Firefox Security – My Way
Do you trust your web browser of choice? Do you frequently make online purchases or bank online? If the answer to both of these is yes… and you use that same PC for most or all of your other work and play, what do you do to protect yourself from online threats?
My first line of defense, was switching my OS to Linux, so I didn’t have to worry about malware getting on my system. This is definitely a bit on the extreme part, but I am working on a full switch to Open Source. In my search for online security – I was looking for a solution that would keep my passwords in sync (with my windows systems). I looked into and tried many of the ‘add-on’ based solutions available for Firefox. Unhappy with what I found, I decided just to stick with my current setup, but actually making use of the master password (in Firefox preferences), which wasn’t as much of a nuisance as I originally thought it may be.
The Firefox master password requires me to enter a password once per session (to unlock my stored passwords), but there are add-ons available to give it a timeout as well. To boost my security (more so on windows systems) I decided to create separate Firefox profiles.
I have a profile for general web browsing, banking, web development and what I like to call ‘kllit’. With the other profiles being self explanatory, the killit profile uses the noscript plugin so I can be sure nothing funky will run on my computer without knowing it. Each profile is configured with its own set of Firefox preferences and add-ons. To manage all of them, I make use of the ProfileSwitcher add-on which allows me to easily launch a new profile while choosing to keep the old profile open or close it before launching the new one.
This is my current and basic Firefox setup… and yes, I have been using Chrome, but I just can’t seem to get it to replace Firefox for me.