There are a lot of privacy and security settings in Mozilla Firefox that you can tweak to maximize your privacy. But configuring Firefox through the built-in “about:config” interface is tricky. ConfigFox offers a user-friendly alternative.
The idea behind ConfigFox is to provide a way to change Firefox settings that is less complicated than the about:config panel. about:config contains hundreds of arcane-looking options and very little in the way of explanation about what they do. Unless you’re an expert, or are willing to spend a long time poring over documentation, it can be hard to know which options to enable or disable in about:config.
ConfigFox translates those options into more human-readable selections, while still providing low-level configurability. In other words, it makes things more user-friendly but doesn’t dumb them down to the extent that you don’t know exactly what you are selecting — it doesn’t have a generic box that says something like “Make Firefox More Private”; instead, it identifies options related to privacy and allows you to enable or disable each one individually.
If you’re concerned about online security and privacy, ConfigFox makes it easy to disable a number of features in Firefox that you probably don’t want running. For example, in a single click, you can do the following:
- Prevent Firefox from accessing your webcam.
- Control the way Firefox handles DNS, which could help prevent it from leaking information about the sites you visit.
- Disable auto suggestions in searches, which could leak information about what you search for.
- Prevent Firefox from integrating your information into Windows’ recent documents folder, in order to keep your data away from other parts of the operating system.
These are just a few examples. ConfigFox gives you options to many more.
ConfigFox is a standalone programs for Windows, not an add-on that you install into Firefox itself. As a result, it doesn’t work on other operating systems. But it is a free download.
Firefox does have an add-on that accomplishes the same thing called “Privacy Settings”