Firefox will match the level of encryption the website uses, and Firefox is capable of higher encryption than 128-bit (256-bit if that is what the website uses).

It depends on which order the server offers. If the server offers 128 bit with a higher priority that 256 bit then Firefox will only select 256 bit if you would disable the 128 bit ciphers.

See also https://www.fortify.net/cgi/ssl_2.pl

The Firefox browser uaseragents used to have a U to denote it is a browser with strong encryption and this was removed as of Firefox 4.0. It was removed as it really was not needed anymore anyways for several years now and the browser we know as Firefox supported 128-bit if not 256-bit since it was Phoenix 0.1 back in Sept 2002. Yes the browser was out for two years before the so called November 9 2004 release date.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/final-user-agent-string-for-firefox-4/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#Encryption_strength_notations

So how does one tell if 128 bit encryption is being used by my Vista machine using FoxFire 22.0? Is there a notification some where saying the level of encryption being used?

Current Firefox releases can't even go below 128 bit, SSL2 that supported this have been removed quite a few releases now (Firefox 8 dropped support for SSL2).

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/8

128 bit is the minimum that you can use with Firefox and you can only go higher (e.g. 168 or 256).
128 bit shouldn't be used these days and servers that only support 128 bit should update their software.

Firefox supports AES-256 since 2002, so that is already more than 10 years.

• https://www.fortify.net/sslcheck.html