Promotional Film

HTML5 has established a new standard that allows the unsolicited delivery of annoying advertising films and supports spying on the user. Many news portals and online daily newspapers now use this type of harassment, for example, to preface unwanted videos with editorially edited sequences.

Since all common browsers play these videos automatically by default, the user is suddenly confronted with multimedia advertising without taking any action to receive it. The uBlock Origin ad blocker reliably filters out these HTML5 videos but does not prevent automated playback of such content.

To decide for yourself what you want to see and what not, set the media.autoplay.enabled entry to false in the configuration dialog of Firefox and its derivatives. This setting ends the forced exposure to commercial broadcasts.

Derivatives

Over the years, many Firefox derivatives have appeared with different goals. In addition to the well-known Tor browser, Pale Moon is another prominent Firefox derivative [5]. You can free these browsers from overly aggressive espionage attempts by manually editing the configuration and installing some special add-ons.

However, not all add-ons offered by Mozilla work with Firefox derivatives, and not all entries will be identical to the equivalent entries in Firefox. For example, Pale Moon offers considerably fewer telemetry entries; however, Pale Moon has enjoyed steadily growing popularity in recent years and is therefore attracting more of its own developers, who are now at work on giving Pale Moon its own collection of extensions.

Conclusions

Although the Mozilla project vociferously defends the user's right to privacy, Firefox sometimes ignores privacy concerns in an effort to extract as much data as possible from users. However, add-ons and configuration settings are available to help you lock down Firefox and minimize privacy concerns.