How to Adjust Privacy Settings in Firefox

When surfing the web, it’s important to avoid putting yourself in a vulnerable position. Your privacy can easily be compromised when anyone with access to your computer looks at your browsing history or the “cookies” that various sites automatically install on your hard drive.

There are various ways to protect your web-browsing privacy with Firefox. This tutorial will walk you through three of the most common.

Managing privacy through Firefox Options:

Click on the Tools menu in Firefox, and then click on Options. In the top menu bar of the Options window that comes up, click on Privacy.
Here, you have a number of options for adjusting your privacy settings:

Tracking: Clicking this check box will alert certain websites that you don’t want your visit to be tracked. However, this doesn’t mean that all websites will respect your wishes!

History: In this section, you can choose from the drop-down menu whether or not you want Firefox to remember the history of web pages you’ve visited. You can tell the browser to remember all history or never remember any history, or you can apply customized settings.

Using custom settings, you can manage your browsing, download, and form histories, as well as allow or reject “cookies,” little files that websites use to communicate with your browser. Deleting cookies makes your privacy more secure.

Firefox Options Window. Under the Privacy tab, you can fine-tune how Firefox handles various parts of your web-browsing records.



Location Bar: Here, you can tell Firefox what to suggest in the Location Bar, the address bar at the top of the main Firefox window. When you start typing in the Location Bar, Firefox will usually suggest sites from your recent history or bookmarks; you can change this to make it suggest only history, only bookmarks, or nothing at all.

Managing privacy through the “Clear Recent History” option:


In the main Firefox window, click on the Tools menu and then on “Clear Recent History.”
The Clear Recent History window.



In the Clear Recent History window that opens, you can select the time range over which you want to clear your history—the last hour, the last two hours, the last four hours, the entire day, or everything—and what parts you wish to erase.



Note: The cache is a folder that temporarily stores parts of sites you view, such as images. Erasing the contents of this folder from the Clear Recent History window can eliminate those small traces.


Making a whole browsing session private:


If you know in advance that you want your entire web-surfing session to be private, click on the Tools menu and then on Start Private Browsing. This will open up a version of Firefox in which no web-browsing history will be saved to your computer. Once you close the private session, Firefox will restore all the tabs and websites you previously had open, if any. Keep in mind that even during such a private browsing session, your internet service provider or company can still monitor your online activities.



The next time you’re surfing in Firefox and you want to keep it private, try some of the above settings and browse without fear.