Facebook Container in Firefox Prevents Facebook From Tracking You

Recently Facebook was in news for their longtime practice of tracking users and abusing the data collected. While the journalists are expressing great shock, the people in the IT community are not really surprised. Facebook has been doing this for years and this is why browser extensions like Disconnect exist. Most of these extensions are third-party created extensions and work on a number of web browsers.

But this time, web browser giant Mozilla has come forward with a new extension called Facebook Container for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. This new extension makes good use of the relatively new Firefox extension called Multi-Account Containers. Using the containers in Firefox, you can isolate your various accounts and use them as if you are using a completely new instance of the web browser. The new extension (Facebook Container) is designed to create a special container for Facebook and isolate it from the rest of the websites that you access.

Facebook Container

After the installation of the Facebook Container extension in Firefox, you won’t notice anything except when you access Facebook. The tab in which you open Facebook and the address bar turn blue indicating that Facebook is being isolated in a container. This also means that if you any website uses Facebook elements (like buttons, comments or sign-in using Facebook account) then these elements won’t work at all or won’t work as expected.

Facebook Container

Mozilla has given a good reason for the creation of this extension – why stop using Facebook when you can isolate it and stop it from tracking you. But I think, they just wanted to show off some of the powerful features of the immensely popular Firefox web browser. In any case, it is working as intended and is keeping Facebook from tracking you.

You can read more about the Facebook Container extension at the Mozilla Blog: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/.

You can get the Facebook Container extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/.