Safe surfing the net is becoming more and more complicated. In addition, in recent months, computer attacks that seek to seize user data, infect their computers and steal their passwords have intensified. Therefore, any security measure that the developers of the main operating systems can provide is welcome. And one of the features that Firefox users will soon be able to benefit from is Site Isolation .
What is Site Isolation and what does it bring us
This site isolation feature has been in development since 2018 under the name ” Project Fission “. However, until now, it has only been available, in testing phase, to users of the Nightly branch of the browser. Mozilla confirmed in 2019 that this security measure was going to reach all browser users, but time has passed and there was no more news about it.
This security measure works, broadly speaking, as an additional security limit that is placed between the websites that we visit. In this way, each of the sites is completely isolated from the others, and each one has its own separate processes from the rest. Thus, no website can access the data of another, and if an element of a page is blocked (for example) it will not cause other websites to be blocked.
Thanks to this feature, for example, users can protect themselves from vulnerabilities such as Meltdown and Specter that allow attackers to collect confidential data by reading any memory address.
Furthermore, it is not only the security of the browser that is improved thanks to this function. Users will also be able to enjoy various performance improvements. For example, by placing the pages in separate processes, each process will load in parallel to others (based on CPU cores), so doing heavy calculations or garbage functions will not affect browser performance.
How to activate this function
The Site Isolation feature has been referred to by Mozilla as ” Fission “. Therefore, the options related to it will have this name. If we are Firefox Nightly users, we can activate this security measure from the browser’s experiments section. To do this, we just have to write in the address bar “about: preferences # experimental”, and look for the entry corresponding to Fission (site isolation). We check its box, restart the browser and that’s it.
In case of using the Beta or Stable versions of Firefox, this process must be done from the advanced configuration of the browser. To do this, we will write “about: config” in the address bar, accept the risks, and search for ” fission.autostart “. We mark the flag as “True”, we restart the browser and that’s it. When you reload, this safety and performance measure is already in place.
Surely in the future it will be activated by default for all users, but for now it is recommended to enable this security measure manually, and only remove it if we have problems. Google Chrome users have been using site isolation since version 67 of the browser, that is, since May 2018. Now, its arrival in Firefox will make Mozilla’s browser more secure and cut distances with Chrome.
