A vital aspect of Internet surfing today is privacy. However, many people who are unaware of the advanced use of computers neglect the security of their data and what they do on the Internet. Then they become easy prey to many cyber thieves and shady-purpose institutions that can get data from them. To improve privacy, Firefox incorporates a very useful tool. So, in this tutorial, I will teach you how to enable DNS-over-HTTPS on Firefox.
Why this is necessary?
When in a web browser like Firefox we type a web address in the address bar, for example, www.osradar.com it happens that the browser sends a request to the Internet to find out what is the IP address associated with that address. Once it finds it, it will start loading the website.
All this sounds great and it works, but there is one drawback. This request made by the web browser is made using plain text, i.e. without any type of filtering. This causes Internet providers or other people to be able to intercept the request and know which websites you are accessing.
To avoid this, Mozilla has been working for some time on a new feature that allows sending the DNS request as one more HTTPS request and encrypting it. This feature is called DNS-over-HTTPS.
The immediate benefits are the privacy and security of knowing that no one can know which sites you want to access. And this includes your internet provider or cyber thieves.
However, there is one thing to keep in mind. Since this is a very secure feature, it is possible to slow down the loading speed of web pages, but according to Mozilla the impact is minimal.
So, if you like privacy, and want to be a little more secure, you have to enable DNS-over-HTTPS.
How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS?
To be a very important feature, enabling it is quite simple. First, go to the Firefox main menu. This is the button that has the three horizontal bars on the right.
Then click on Preferences.
In the General section, at the end, you will see a button with the Network options. Click on that button.
Scroll down and at the end, you will see the Enable DNS over HTTPS box. There you will see that Cloudflare is the default provider due to the collaboration between this company and Mozilla. Obviously you can change it.
Apply the changes by clicking on the Ok button and you’re done.
This way, now your web browsing is more private and secure. It is expected that soon this feature will be enabled by default in future versions of Firefox.
It is never too much to take extra safety measures when surfing the internet. Therefore, Mozilla implements DNS-over-HTTPS so that our DNS requests are protected against third parties who want to violate our privacy on the network.
For more information, Mozilla’s site for DNS-over-HTTPS is great.
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