Mozilla also added the ClearURL extension to the add-on store, which cleans up and shortens URLs from trackers. Aside from the core URL, there are often characters and numbers that are meant to track you when you share a product on Amazon or a social media post.
The first is Mozilla’s Firefox Relay, which allows you to hide your real email address and enter a proxy email address that redirects incoming emails to your inbox. The idea behind it is not too different from Sign in with Apple, which doesn’t reveal your real email address.
Furthermore, Firefox for Android is getting an extension that reads articles for you while you do other things. The ReadAloud extension allows you to listen to articles by using text-to-speech technology. However, this is not unique to Firefox. Chrome allows you to read webpages using Google Assistant. Alternatively, you can use a tool like Listening.io to convert articles into podcasts, which you can then listen to using your preferred podcast player.
While Mozilla is making updates to Firefox for Android with these new extensions, it is experimenting with a new iOS browser, too. Gecko is the open-source web engine that powers Firefox on all other platforms, and the organization is working on an experimental Gecko-based browser for iOS. Apple currently only allows WebKit-based browsers on its platform — Safari makes use of the WebKit engine. That could change if European regulations force Apple to abandon this rule and allow browsers to use different web engines.