- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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Very good! Please remove anonym/PPA, DoH to cloudflare, Google search, telemetry, and pocket next, and I’ll make a consideration to stop calling your browser malware!
Shocker, FF troll hates on FF even when it does good things
1 step forwards 3 steps back is still 1 step forward 3 steps back
Couldn’t help but notice there were zero “steps back” in this post. Are they in the room with you now?
This is old news, from 2022!!
From the blog post:
“June 14, 2022”
“Updated Aug. 28, 2024”
“And starting in 2024, all our users can look forward to Firefox blocking even more third party cookies.”
Except it’s still out of date because it mentions chrome also blocking third party cookies when at this point in time they’ve announced that they’ve abandoned that course of action now.
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I don’t know why this wasn’t the case long ago.
It increases implementation complexity of the browser and loses people who fund Firefox and contribute code $$$
Disabling cross site cookie is already a thing for decades…
Same with Do Not Track requests.
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Thank you for your explanation, tbat greatly clears up my confusion.
TBH, if a person’s concern is being tracked by, for example, Facebook; then this just lets Facebook continue tracking them without directly allowing Facebook’s anaylitics customers to track them to another site directly (but indirectly that information can still be provided). But I guess for all the people giving FB and Google those proviledges better to have this than not.
Do Not Track has never really done anything, it just asks websites politely to not track you. There’s no legal or technical limitation here.
I still much rather have it than not. It also lead to the spiritual successor GPC which does actually have regulatory requirements under the CCPA.
Fair. However, it also provides websites with additional information to fingerprint you, so that’s a thing too.
Isn’t this basically Firefox’s version of the third party cookie block that Chrome rolled out a few months ago? Or am I missing something here?
I mean, it’s good news either way but I just want to know if this is somehow different or better.
Sites are much more contained now. Is much more like a profile per site.
Basically creates a fake VM like environment for each site.
Hahahahaha so it doesn’t break anything that still relies on cookies, but neuters the ability to share them.
That’s awesome
Unless that cookie was somehow important for you to use both sites, but thats incredibly rare.
I would love to see an icon of a neutered cookie please 🥺😄.
Honestly, I thought that’s how it already worked.
Edit: I think what I’m remembering is that you can define the cookies by site/domain, and restrict to just those. And normally would, for security reasons.
But some asshole sites like Facebook are making them world-readable for tracking, and this breaks that.
They’ve been doing this with container tabs, so this must be the successor to that idea (I’m going to assume they’ll still have container tabs).
Container tabs are still useful, as they let you use multiple Cookie jars for the same site. So, it is very easy to have multiple accounts on s site.
Container tabs are still a thing in FF. This is based on that work, if I remember correctly.
I love container tabs. It’s one of the reasons I went back to FF.
Same, they’re an absolute game changer for me. I have to use multiple different identities in work due to separate active directories and container tabs makes it super easy
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That’s not what I was thinking of, which was even more fundamental. But that’s good info (and another way to cover stuff in the article).
Edit: what I was thinking originally was really stupid, that 3rd-party cookies weren’t allowed at all. Which was really dumb since of course they are.
No, you weren’t far off. A single site can only get and set cookies on its domain. For example, joesblog.com can’t read your Facebook session cookie, because that would mean they could just steal your session and impersonate you.
But third-party cookies are when joesblog.com has a Facebook like button on each post. Those resources are hosted by Facebook, and when your browser makes that request, it sends your Facebook cookies to Facebook. But this also lets Facebook know which page you’re visiting when you make that request, which is why people are upset.
With this third-party cookie blocking, when you visit joesblog.com and it tries to load the Facebook like button, either the request or just the request’s cookies will be blocked.
Although that raises an interesting question. Facebook is at facebook.com, but its resources are all hosted under fbcdn.com. Have they just already built their site to handle this? Maybe they just don’t strictly need your facebook.com cookies to load scripts, images, etc. from fbcdn.com.
From my experience, blocking 3rd party cookies in general doesn’t seem to make any difference for site functionality anyways. Though I never log into sites with a Google or FB account other than Google or FB sites (and rarely at all for the latter).
For those who don’t care to read the full article
Or even the whole title, really
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Oracle, SAP, Redhat, all of their customer portals require it for SSO. I’m not saying it should be that way, but it is.
Alright fine ill switch browsers AGAIN
Starting in what versions?
Maybe they should try to develop the uBlock Origin extension with the dev to make it last more.
Article from JUNE 14, 2022
ah yes, the other TCP
Tasty Consensual Photos
Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.
Or have some higher tier version called Ultimate Cookie Protection {UDP)
Id prefer a security security oriented Secure Cookie Total Protection (SCTP)
LOL
Wouldn’t that be Ultimate Dookie Protection?
danvit, yes
Yes we are going to enable this feature that is going to be irrelevant in the future, because where building an API in the browser to fetch browser History…
Yeah maybe 10 years late…
I’m curious how this will affect OAuth (if at all). Does it use an offsite cookie to remember the session, or is that only created after it redirects back to the site that initiated the login?
I my experience it generally breaks it. Leveraging cookies on the auth domain is fine, but once you are redirected to another domain, that application needs to take the access and refresh tokens and manage reauthentication as a background process. Simply don’t store those things as cookies though.
I was also wondering that
Does making it the default also set it on my already-downloaded Firefox or only to new downloads? Just to know if I’ll have to manually set it.
It very probably wont change your settings for you. That would be super annoying if it changed things you set on purpose.
What if I never changed it in the first place. So before I had it on “default” and now it would still be on “default”.
Good to know anyway
making Firefox the most private and secure major browser
If calling home and to selected 3rd party analytics aren’t part of the metric then yes, Firefox might be the most private.
Just move to LibreWolf.
You’re aware that LibreWolf is a Firefox fork, right? The quote is literally “major browser”, which obviously precludes fairly niche forks.
Of course I am… and that’s the point. Librewolf is Firefox without the spyware.
But it’s not a “major browser.” It’s a niche fork that has valuable adjustments for power users, but would be unusable for your average non-technically inclined user. I use Librewolf myself and appreciate it, but it’s not something you can just drop on an older relative’s machine and expect to work fine. Firefox has plenty of issues out of the box with sneaking in ads and telemetry, but at the same time you still have to understand that it’s an important player in the market despite its flaws because it’s the only real mainstream competitor to an entirely Chromium-based ecosystem, and despite the issues it does have, it’s still lightyears ahead of Chrome.
Forgive me if this is an overly simplistic view but if the ads with cookies are all served on Google’s platform say then would all those ads have access to the Google cookie jar?
If they don’t now then you can bet they are working on just that.
They are usually separate things. Cookies are produced/saved locally, to be read in the next visit (by the same website or maany websites basically forever unless you use firefox containers or at least clear them once in a while). There’s also local storage which is different but can also be used to identify you across the web. Ads, trackers, all of these categories are often made of many small components: you read a single article on a “modern” newspaper website, hundreds of connection are being made, different tiny scripts or icons or images are being downloaded (usually from different subdomains for different purposes but there’s no hard rule). It’s possible to block one thing and not another. For example I can block Google Analytics (googletagmanager) which is a tracker, but accept all of Google’s cookies.
So that’s what third party cookies are. What this does is make it so that when you go to example.com and you get a Google cookie, that cookie is only associated with example.com, and your random.org Google cookie will be specific to that site.
A site will be able to use Google to track how you use their site, which is a fine and valid thing, but they or Google don’t get to see how you use a different site. (Google doesn’t actually share specifics, but they can see stuff like “behavior on one site led to sale on the other”)
The way I’m reading it, they allow the third party cookies to be used within the actual site you’re on for analytics, but prevent them from being accessed by that third party on other sites.
But I just looked at the linked article’s explanation, and not a technical deep dive.
We’ll have to see what happens but what you are talking about is what Mozilla calls Third-Party Cookies and… they are aware of it.
I can’t entirely tell if that means they will be put in the facebook cookie jar or if it will be put in the TentaclePorn Dot Org (don’t go there, it is probably a real site and probably horrifying) cookie jar. If the former? Then only facebook themselves have that which… is still a lot better I guess? If the latter then that is basically exactly what we all want but a lot of sites are gonna break (par for the course with Firefox but…).
TentaclePorn Dot Org (don’t go there, it is probably a real site and probably horrifying)
It’s registered through namecheap and points to cloudflare, but there’s nothing behind cloudflare. It just times out. That was disappointing.
The cookie would go to the Facebook or tentacleporn cookie jar depending on which site the user has actually visited. Whatever the domain in the address bar says.
InB4 the guy who replies to defend tenticle porn…
Get fucked, advertisers.
Advertisers track you with device fingerprinting and behaviour profiling now. Firefox doesn’t do much to obscure the more advanced methods of tracking.
EU outlaws it
The EU isn’t the only place on the planet, even if its laws have an impact.
It’s really strange how they specifically mention HTML5 canvas when you can run any fingerprinter test on the internet and see that Firefox does nothing to obfuscate that. You can run a test in Incognito mode, start a new session on a VPN, run another test, and on Firefox your fingerprint will be identical.
Well yeah, they’re just blocking known fingerprinting services. If you use a tool that they don’t recognize, it’ll still work, but their approach will still block the big companies that can do the most harm with that data.
The only alternative is probably to disable WebGL entirely, which isn’t a reasonable thing to do by default.
WebGL
I wish Firefox had a per-site or per-domain preference for WebGL (as well as for wasm, etc), the same way we have per-site cookies or notifs preferences. It’d help clear most issues regarding this.
Honestly would be hard to do. There a perfectly legitimate and everyday uses for pretty much everything used in fingerprinting. Taking them away or obscuring them in one way or another would break so much.
Librewolf has Resist Fingerprinting which comes pretty far.
Every Librewolf browser uses the same windows user agent, etc. But there are downsides, like time zones don’t work, and sites don’t use dark mode by default.
And even then, EFF’s Cover Your Tracks site can still uniquely identify me, mainly through window size. That’s one of the reasons why Tor Browser uses letterboxing to make the window size consistent.
I don’t know what letterboxing is. But if window size is used to identify me, can’t it be circumvented simply by using the window in restored size, and not maximised?
Your restored window size is even more unique than your maximised window size!
The correct solution is to just not make the window size available to JS or to remotes at all. There’s no reason to ever need specifics on window size other than CSS media-queries, and those can be done via profiles.
But the restored size keeps changing - can’t be profiled, right?
And how do I not make the size available “to JS or to remote”?
Librewolf supports letterboxing as well, though the setting might be disabled by default
Don’t all the advanced ways rely on JavaScript?
Lots do. But do you know anyone that turns JS off anymore? Platforms don’t care if they miss the odd user for this - because almost no one will be missed.
“Anymore”? I’ve never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don’t even know how to do it if I wanted to.
I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I’ve never met another NoScripter in the wild.
Why not just use ublock medium mode?
Roughly similar to using Adblock Plus with many filter lists + NoScript with 1st-party scripts/frames automatically trusted. Unlike NoScript however, you can easily point-and-click to block/allow scripts on a per-site basis.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode
Am I in the wild? I use it.
They probably mean in the flesh.
I don’t really talk about it in meat space, so they just might not have known.
The people who I’ve tried to get on NoScript seem to have the brain capacity of goldfish. If the site doesn’t instantly work, it’s as if the sky has fallen and there is no way to convince them to pay attention to which scripts are actually needed.
It’s a rare breed that is willing to put up with toggling different scripts on and off. I’ll also acknowledge that too many people (including me) are in a giant rush. For work-type stuff, I have the laptop without noscript, because sometimes I do need something to work absolutely right now.
Well, you know what they say. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it interested in learning about the water cycle to have a deeper understanding of why the river flows in the first place.
You don’t think you are being a tad judgemental?
People whose lives revolve around fashion probably think you dress like shit.
People who love food probably think you eat like shit.
People who love cars probably think you are a shit driver.
You probably love computers and care about privacy, and you are shitting on regular users(assumption, admittedly) for not being invested.
They had something that was working, you present noscript, thing no longer works. If you are not invested, how are you going to see the appeal of extra work?
I use LibreJS with few exceptions. If I need to use a site that requires non-free JavaScript, I’ll use a private browsing window or (preferably) Tor Browser.
uBlock origin + NoScript for me. I deal with the bigger umbrella of scripts with uBlock and then fine tune permissions to the ones that uBlock allowed with NoScript.
They might be fingerprinting me using these two extensions though.
I go hard with DNS-based ad blocking and I’m constantly confirming it works by checking the network tab in developer tools. I’m basically only seeing first party scripts and CDN assets — 99% of websites don’t host tracking garbage themselves.
Pihole?
It’s a common solution but I do something more involved and manual, but it’s the same concept.
Is it something you can talk about? I’m currently in the process of trying to switch from pihole to pfblockerng but am interested if there are better alternatives
Not all but most, yes. But TBF, sites that still function with JS disabled tend to have the least intrusive telemetry, and might pre-date big data altogether.
Regardless, unless the extent of a page’s analytics is a “you are the #th visitor” counter, all countermeasures must remain active.
There is still plenty of fish for advertisers, sadly.