On Thursday, Mozilla announced that — in future releases of its Firefox web browsing software — it will prevent any malware relating to cryptojacking from running. The company's announcement is considered to be a subset of a broader initiative to stop tracking software from loading in the browser, which the company will implement in the coming months. Tracking software, according to a recent study performed by the developers of a third-party extension called Ghostery, is a major reason why web pages take so long to load. Ghostery believes that more 50% of an average web page's load time is spent loading various third-party trackers. In upcoming versions of Firefox, by default the browser will prevent cryptomining scripts from running. These scripts use a user's CPU to mine cryptocurrencies without them knowing about it. The reason that the company will block both these scripts and trackers is to give users more control over both their computers and their private data. Mozilla has long been in the forefront of data privacy. In 2016, with data encryption becoming more and more standard, the company enacted policies to encourage their users to take online security and privacy more seriously. It has also been reported that Mozilla is further planning to block HTTPS connections that use insufficiently strong encryption, and that they would require both a minimum of 1023-bit encryption during TLS handshaking and the use of Diffie-Hellman keys. Firefox is not the first major web browser to implement protections against cryptomining. Late last year, the developers of Opera added such protection, which was included in the ad blocker that comes standard with the desktop version of the browser. They also plan to make the same feature available in their mobile edition. Opera also comes with an integrated cryptocurrency wallet. The feature, which has been available for their mobile app and which will soon be available for the desktop edition, supports both tokens and digital collectibles. Charles Hamel, who is the product lead for Opera Crypto, said that the wallet is just another step in making cryptocurrencies a mainstream component of Web 3.0.