Securing FireFox
This is mostly just a matter of installing a handfull of plugins and configuring them correctly. Nothing you can’t do with your mouse and minimal keyboard action.
There’s four main ones you want to get: (Each title is a link to the plugin’s page.)
Ad Block Edge
This does what its name implies: blocks ads. This is awesome for two reasons: lots of ads are traps planted by hackers and loading ads makes your browser load pages slower. See? Security AND speed in one go. You can’t beat that!
NoScript
Webpages today come with a list of scripts they try to run as soon as the page loads. Some of these are quite dangerous, and can even give a hacker instant access to your computer. This kills off all script and then gives you the option to re-enable a few or all of them for a site if you trust it. For instance, I might browse to a site and notice it hast two scripts it’s trying to run: one of its own (it will have the sites URL in the name) and one of Google’s ad-sense things. I don’t like being tracked, but I want the site to function normally so I’ll enable its script, but leave Google out.
Ghostery
Basically, this thing finds scripts and other things that are specifically aimed at tracking you and disables them. There’s some overlap between this and No-script, but I like to run both because this seems to be more specifically aimed at blocking trackers.
Flash Block
This one was just recently suggested to me. Flash Block, like ad block edge, does what it’s name suggests: blocks flash players from playing. This means all sorts of videos and other things that use flash stay disabled until you need them, and malicious flash programs don’t get to run by accident. Again improving speed & security.
Firefox Options
Also of importance are the settings in your Options menu. If you are having trouble finding the options panel for Firefox: Google is your friend.
Under the Content Tab in your options menu, there’s a check-box for disallowing popups. Make sure that gets checked. Popups are hazardous for a million and one different reasons.
Under the Privacy Tab, we have a bunch of useful options. You can even use a check-box here to tell sites you don’t want to be tracked, though I doubt it does any good.
I’ll leave the settings for cookies & your history up to you. More history and cookies mean more junk clogging up your computer in the long run, less is generally better, but none at all can sometimes hurt more than it helps. I’d recommend to kill all your cookies and history if you’re going to be surfing porn or some kind of “dark” websites like that, but otherwise allowing a little is generally better.
The Security Tab is (obviously) one of the most important in the context of this article. These check-boxes need to be checked before you even think of anything else: “Warn me when sites try to install addons”, “Block reported attack sites”, & “Block reported web forgeries”.
Whether or not to remember passwords is up to you, but you need to know: anyone with direct access to your computer can theoretically gain access to those passwords. If you’re a parent with a 13+ year old child, I promise he/she knows how to find these passwords.
The Advanced Tab doesn’t have too much security-related. The only reason you would need to do anything security related in here is for clearing local data and setting up a proxy. If you have a proxy, then props to you. Use it. For everyone else, avoid the advanced tab unless you know what you’re doing.