DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is a security feature in the Mozilla Firefox web browser that has existed for more than a year. Using this feature, your browser resolves the domain names over a secure connection and does not use the system configured DNS server settings.
There are many benefits of using DoH in Firefox. For one, your ISP cannot look at the DNS resolution queries to find out all the websites that you have been visiting which gives you some level of privacy. And then if your ISP configured DNS server is blocking or redirecting certain domain names, DoH can help you free from these restrictions.
Firefox has made it very easy to enable DoH. Here is how you can set NextDNS for use with DoH in Firefox:
- In your Firefox web browser, enter about:preferences in the address bar. You can also click on the Firefox menu and select Options from there.
- Select the General category from the left side, scroll down to the very bottom and click on Settings button under the Network Settings section.
- In the Connection Settings window, scroll down to the bottom and select Enable DNS over HTTPS then select NextDNS from the list of providers and click on the OK button.
- Close Firefox and start it again.
- You can see how Firefox is resolving DNS by entering about:networking#dns in the address bar.You can set this page to automatically refresh to continue seeing all the new hostname resolutions.
Now your web browser will be resolving DNS queries over HTTPS. The traffic is very secure and all of the domain resolution requests coming from your browser will be kept private. NextDNS offers automatic blocking of malicious sites, trackers and more. Just by switching to NextDNS you can avoid all the malicious websites. Other DNS provider available in Firefox is Cloudflare.