How to gain security in Firefox with the site isolation feature, Fission
The developers of Firefox understand that the security of web browsers is paramount, so they have started rolling out a new site isolation feature. Jack Wallen shows you how to activate Fission.
Mozilla developers are doing everything they can to stop Firefox from disappearing at sunset, a forgotten and unused browser. This is a good thing because Firefox is an important browser that has brought revolutionary features over the years. One thing (at least I hope) that developers are starting to see is that it’s more important to focus on releasing a browser that works reliably, efficiently, and securely, rather than a browser. full of features that no one will use.
To that end, the developers of Firefox turned to browser security with a new feature, called Fission (also known as site isolation), which is long overdue.
What site isolation does is isolate each site in a separate process, which makes it harder for malicious websites to access private information such as passwords, credit card numbers. credit, social security numbers and more, which have been loaded by other sites. With Fission, attackers will not be able to use exploits (such as Specter and Meltdown) to collect sensitive data from content in memory.
This is an important feature that everyone should use. Although the feature is still in the experimental phase, it can be activated on all versions of Firefox: Release, Beta and Nightly.
I’ll show you how to enable Fission on standard and nightly versions of Firefox.
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What you will need
To activate Fission, you will need an updated version of the Firefox version of your choice.
How to activate Fission on Firefox
We will first take a look at the regular version of Firefox. To activate Fission, open Firefox and type about: config. In the resulting window type fission.autostart. When the option appears, double-click False until it says True (Figure A).
Figure A
Restart Firefox and Fission is now enabled.
How to activate Fission on Firefox Nightly
Now let’s enable Fission on Firefox Nightly. It’s a little easier. Open Firefox Nightly and type about: preferences # experimental in the address bar. Scroll down to Fission and check the associated box (Figure B).
Figure B
Restart Firefox Nightly to complete Fission activation.
Hopefully the Mozilla developers will make this new feature enabled, by default, for each version of Firefox. The need for browser security is at an all-time high. If Firefox could only add workspaces functionality, I could go back to the open source browser as the daily driver.
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