To improve privacy and performance, starting late September 2019, Mozilla to rollout and enable DNS over HTTPS (DoH) by default in Firefox release for users in the US.
After conducting many experiments in the last two years, the organization has come to a decision to turn on DoH by default in Firefox. The company believes from this, their “users will benefit from the greater protections of encrypted DNS traffic”. The Firefox browser will alert users when the feature is enabled and allows them to opt-out.
Today in a blog post, Mozilla said it surprised them to know 70k users already explicitly enabled DoH in Firefox release version. Before releasing DoH to the United States of America, the organization said this in regards to deploying of DoH: we “honor enterprise configuration and respect user choice about parental controls.”
The company says they will deploy DoH in fallback mode, means, if the domain name lookup fails using DoH, then Firefox will fall back and use Operating system default DNS for lookups.
In case you don’t know, Mozilla preferred to use Cloudflare for DoH as they agreed to a strong privacy agreement, so some Firefox users in the US will use Cloudflare DNS by default soon, this may change in future.
As said above, Firefox allows to disable DoH and revert to system DNS, below we shed information on how that can be done and we’ve also shared instructions below on how to check Firefox is using Cloudflare DNS.
First things first, to enable DNS over HTTPS in Firefox stable,
1. Launch Firefox
2. Click on menu > Options > General > Network Settings > “Enable DNS Over HTTPS”
In the above screenshot, you can notice Firefox Network Settings mentioning Cloudflare as the default provider. To use System DNS again, you need to disable “Enabled DNS over HTTPS” option mentioned above.
To check Firefox is using Cloudflare DNS or not
- After enabling DoH, visit https://1.1.1.1/help
- The page reveals your connection information, if you got “Yes” for both “Connected to 1.1.1.1” and using “DNS over HTTPS (DoH) “, then DoH is turned on for you and your Firefox is using Cloudflare DNS without any doubts.
