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IronFox

Safe Browsing

IronFox enables Google Safe Browsing by default to provide users with real-time protection against malware, phishing, and other threats.

Firefox’s Safe Browsing implementation is very well-designed from a privacy perspective. It is free and open source, and unlike Chromium browsers on Android, does not rely on Google Play Services.

On top of Firefox’s already privacy-respecting design and implementation of Safe Browsing, we take additional measures to further improve privacy for users, by routing connections to Google through our proxy.

When Safe Browsing is enabled, IronFox will periodically update its database (through our proxy) to provide protection against the latest threats. Additionally, if a potential match for a malicious website is found, IronFox might submit a partial hash of the suspected URL to Google (through our proxy).

At the cost of security, you can disable Safe Browsing if desired, by navigating to Settings -> IronFox -> IronFox settings -> Security -> Enable Safe Browsing.

If you’d like to keep Safe Browsing enabled, but prefer to disable our proxy and connect to Google directly, you can do this by navigating to your about:config, and following these steps:

  • Find the browser.safebrowsing.provider.ironfox.lists preference. Select and Copy its current value, and change it to disabled.
  • Find the browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.lists preference, and change its value to the value of the browser.safebrowsing.provider.ironfox.lists preference that you copied before.

If you’d like to revert back to using our proxy, you can do so at any time by resetting the values of the browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.lists and browser.safebrowsing.provider.ironfox.lists preferences.