How to Enable ESNI

Last Updated: October 21, 2021

ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication) is a proposed standard that encrypts the Server Name Indication (SNI), which is how your browser tells the web server which website it wants to access. By default, the SNI is not encrypted, which means that anybody on the same network as you or your Internet Service Provider can see which websites you are connecting to. Enabling ESNI helps protect your privacy by making it harder for others to see what website you are connecting to.^{[1]
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Research source} This wikiHow will tell you how to enable ESNI.

Keep in mind that Google Chrome does not support ESNI.

This article has been marked as historical.

Firefox no longer supports ESNI (Posted 2021-02-20).

Steps

1
Download Mozilla Firefox, if you don't already have it. Currently, Firefox is the only mainstream browser that supports ESNI,^{[2]
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Research source} so you will have to download and use Firefox in order to use ESNI.
- To download Firefox, navigate to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/, and then click on Download Firefox. Then, open the installer and follow the on-screen instructions to install Firefox.
- Once ESNI becomes and official standard, other browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge will probably add support for it as well.
2
Type about:config into the URL bar. This will allow you to access the advanced configuration settings.

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3
Click Accept the Risk and Continue.
4
Type esni into the search bar. The search bar is near the top of the page.
5
Double-click the option that says network.security.esni.enabled. Then, close Firefox, and then reopen it. This will enable ESNI.

Warnings

ESNI is only supported on sites that use Cloudflare and on a few other sites. While Cloudflare does have over 60,000 websites that use it, there are still millions of other sites that do not currently support ESNI, so your protection will be limited.

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You cannot enable ESNI on Firefox for iOS.^{[4]
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Research source}

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ESNI is still only a proposed standard in Beta, so it is possible, although unlikely, that it might have bugs in it that cause some strange issues.

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