Does Firefox 70's Enhanced Tracking Protection obsolete certain extensions?

Question

Now that Firefox 70 has Enhanced Tracking Protection, are various major plugins obsolete?

I'm using these security-related extensions:

• Disconnect
• uBlock Origin
• Privacy Badger

Are they still necessary?

Answer 1

A good question, and one that I was curious about too.

The long answer is: not entirely. Mozilla tells us that the list of trackers that Firefox blocks comes from Disconnect, so in theory, the Disconnect extension is obsolete if you just want the protection without the fancy blocking statistics. Disconnect's website also provides the list of all domains it blocks and doesn't block, so if you want to know the precise details, there's nothing to stop you.

Other extensions like uBlock, Adblock Plus etc, either allow custom blocking and/or subscriptions to multiple block lists curated by different people, so you obviously get more control in those cases. Another kind of control that you get with these extensions that you cannot get with the vanilla browser is blocking/allowing specific domains per-site. Firefox's tracking protection is either on or off in its entirety. Case-in-point, I often find that I need to enable a few specific things that are blocked by default when I want to talk to an online support agent, since those services often double up as analytics services.