Secure Settings for Firefox

Secure Settings for Firefox

firefox privacy security

Reading time: 2 minutes

Ray Heffer

Firefox Release 122.0 (January 23, 2024)

I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser since 2010, and here are my recommended settings to further enhance your security and privacy:

Preferences

1. Downloads (Preferences > General)

Disable automatic downloads by enabling the prompt to ‘Always ask you where to save files’.

2. Home (Preferences > Home)

  • Set the default homepage to https://duckduckgo.com
  • Disable all Firefox Home content by deselecting Web Search, Top Sites, Highlights, and Snippets.
  • Ensure New Tabs is set to ‘Blank Page’

3. Search (Preferences > Search)

  • Set Default Search Engine to DuckDuckGo
  • Disable Search Suggestions (optional) - I recommend only enabling ‘Show search suggestions in address bar results’
  • Set Search Shortcuts to DuckDuckGo only (deselect or remove the others)

4. Browser Privacy (Preferences > Privacy & Security)

  • Set Enhanced Tracking Protection to Strict

If this breaks too many sites, go ahead and change it back to Standard. Use what works for you.

  • Enable ‘Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed’
  • Click on Manage Exceptions and add any sites you want to retain cookies for. I do this for sites I use every day, and you can wildcard entire domains (E.g. https://twitter.com)
  • Deselect all items in Login and Passwords. I never use the browser to store these things, instead use KeePassXC or BitWarden.
  • Select ‘Use custom settings for history’ in the History dropdown, and deselect all options. Cookies for sites we enabled in Manage Exceptions will still be kept.

  • Under Address Bar, select only Bookmarks and deselect everything else.
  • For each of the following permissions, click on ‘Settings…’ and then select ‘Block new requests…’ at the bottom of each
    • Location
    • Camera
    • Microphone
  • Finally, deselect all options in Firefox Data Collection and Use.

Note: I don’t add / change my bookmarks very often, so I simply export them to an HTML file as a backup every now and then.

Recommended Add-Ons

I don’t like to add too many add-ons, since the more you add will increase the potential of one of them being vulnerable to attack or making your browser more unique (it’s fingerprint). Panopticlick is a useful tool to see how unique your browser fingerprint is.

Here are the 3 essential add-ons, that I would install without question:

  1. uBlock Origin
  2. Multi-Account Containers