managing your relationship with sites

This post is co-written by Margaret Lebovic and Sid Stamm. This article is cross-posted on Margaret's blog

As the web becomes more and more complex (and AWESOME), it's important that you can manage your relationship with the variety of sites out there. Sure, Firefox 4 has a Page Info dialog that lets you control what a web page is allowed to do, including whether you want to let it store data on your computer, access your location information, open pop-up windows, and on and on. However, this dialog only lets you manage your relationship with the one page you're currently visiting, not the entire set of sites you visit on the web.

We think it's important to be able to manage your whole relationship with web sites in an intuitive way, and that's why we're exited to show you what we've started working on: a site-based permissions interface.

This feature is still experimental, but you can give it a shot. In the future, we'll be putting some polish on the UI, adding more controls like "always access securely" (HSTS), and hopefully giving you a better view of what a site knows about you. We also want to integrate this permissions manager with the site identity block in the location bar for quick and easy access.

Try it out! Grab a Firefox nightly build and try out the feature by typing about:permissions into the location bar.

(Credit: thanks to Jennifer Boriss, Medhi Mulani and Margaret for all the hard work on this project.)

Do Not Track -- Now on Firefox Mobile!

Since we first announced our implementation of the Do Not Track HTTP
header, we've seen an amazing amount of support from trade groups, and even other browser makers.
To build on our view that you should have control of how you're tracked
on not only desktop computers but also your mobile devices, we're
excited to announce that the latest beta of Firefox for Android also includes this feature.

You can enable Do Not Track in the latest beta of Firefox for Android through an
easy-to-find switch in the preferences--see image to the right, and websites will see exactly the same signal that Do Not Track-enabled desktop browsers send. Every time Firefox loads a web page, image, or advertisement it includes a "DNT: 1" signal that tells the entire web you don't want to be tracked.

The web on your phone should be the same web as on your desktop, so to
provide this consistency we've put the exact same Do Not Track feature
in both the desktop and mobile versions of Firefox.

Try it out today! Grab the latest beta of Firefox for Android and turn on the feature. If you visit my blog from Firefox (mobile or desktop) with Do Not Track turned on, the widget below will glow green just for you.

Clearing Flash cookies using Firefox

Back in March, we shipped Firefox 4 with a feature that sends a signal to plugins like Flash and Silverlight when you clear your cookies. Adobe has announced that starting with Flash Player version 10.3, they'll be listening to the signal! This is exciting, because clearing your flash cookies is as easy as clearing regular cookies in this latest version of flash.

Here's when Firefox 4 tells Flash Player version 10.3 to delete LSOs (Flash cookies):

• When you clear all your cookies in Firefox using "clear recent history" [how-to link]
• When you choose "forget about this site" in your library (history) window [how-to link]
• When you quit Firefox, if you have Firefox configured to clear your cookies automatically upon exit [how-to link]

Chrome and Internet Explorer are also supporting this behavior, so this is fantastic news for everyone's privacy on the web!

More reading for techies:

• The relevant Firefox bug
• The NPAPI specification
• Previous story about supporting Private Browsing mode