How to add Trusted sites to the Mozilla Firefox browser
This article contains detailed instruction on how to add trusted sites to the Mozilla Firefox browser, as well a list of the benefits of doing so. Hopefully our readers will find it as a useful tool in their efforts to keep their computers more secure.
Why should you add Trusted sites to your browser?
It appears that actually a few people make good use of this excellent feature Firefox offers us. The benefits may not be immediately imminent, but they are there. Using trusted sites will both help keep your PC safe and reduce your annoyance when you have to deal with the security features that arrange for your safety.
When you add a site to the trusted sites you are basically telling your browser that this particularly site is perfectly safe. This allows Firefox to load the site more quickly and smoothly, possibly skipping some security checks along the way.
Another very important feature of using the Trusted sites option is that it will enable add-ons as an exception. Add-ons like Java, Adobe Flash and the ActiveX plug-in are a great security vulnerability for your browser. They can be exploited by many viruses in order to infect your computer without your knowledge. The worst viruses like Trojan horses and Ransomware are also very hard to detect by anti-virus software. Cutting all access points for those is the first (and best) line of defense for your computer. Because of this most internet browsers (Mozilla included) now keep Flash and Java disabled by default. Actually, there is a whole campaign that aims to phase out Java and Flash written content from websites and that campaign is supported by the owning companies. This is, however, a slow process and perhaps several years may have to pass before we stop seeing Java/Flash based content in the sites we visit. And while stoping these two programs is something good and healthy for your computer, it is bound to some problems. The most obvious is that content written in Java or Flash will not be displayed unless you manually activate the plug-in for the page. This will get tedious very quickly if you have to do it for sites you already know to be safe and which you visit frequently.
By adding such sites to Firefox’s trusted sites you create an exception for the sites and all content will be properly displayed for your leisure. Of course, you have to be absolutely sure that any site you add to the Trusted sites section is really safe.
How to add trusted sites
Step 1:
Open your Firefox browser, then click on the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner. From the drop-down menu select Options.
Step 2:
You are not inside the Settings menu.
Click on the Security tab, then on the upper Exceptions button.
Step 3:
You can now enter or remove the URLs of trusted site.
- WARNING! When entering URLs please include the full address of the website, but without any sub-sections. A sub-section is divided from the main url by “/”. When you want to enter the address of the site include everything between the first “/” symbol, if any. If you add the address with the sub-section you’ll only flag the sub-section as a trusted site and the rest of the site will still be considered unsafe by the browser.
Step 4:
All done!