11mo ago

Why has Firefox not removed third-party cookies, despite the fact that Chrome has begun phasing them out?

33 comments

I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.
Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.
- You’re telling me Firefox is the better browser?! Well colour me surprised.
- Not sure how Chrome's alternatives for providing relevant ads are harder to block when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it's collected) in the settings. These systems are what Chrome is able to do at the moment to work towards blocking third party cookies. They do have an incentive to make something that they know works well for them though, I'll give you that.
  
  when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it’s collected) in the settings
  Is that part of the chromium engine which is open source or is it closed source ? Because if that part of the code is not visible it doesn't matter what Google tells you.
  
  As a relative layman I also have the same question. If you can turn it off, what makes it so bad?
  I’m not saying I trust Google, of course. It just seems like they have a vested interest in screwing over third party advertisers and making them more dependent on Google. If you can then disable the Google part, isn’t it a net benefit?
  (I don’t use chrome and am not familiar with this change, so I may be missing something)

Firefox blocks known trackers and isolates third party cookies per site. They do have legitimate uses, and not every site has made the switch to modern tech that could replace it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-party-cookies/
- That's the superior approach and Firefox introduced it far earlier than Google addressed the problem.
  Why OP is blindly arguing in that corp's favor and ignoring all the reasoning provided here, is beyond me. Shilling?
- Yeah my company uses them for integrating some of our apps together. They aren't used for tracking at all, and we'd be up shits creek if they were, because our (corporate) customers audit that sort of thing.
  Because of Google we've had to create an alternative solution which has taken years to develop and is only getting deployed now. Those fuckers have way too much power over the Internet.

There's a check box in FF settings to block all third party cookies.
You should probably educate yourself before making inaccurate claims.
- The option to disable third party cookies has been in pretty much every browser (Chrome included) for decades. OP is talking about Google's move to make it the default.
- Is it default? Idk
  
  No because some pages might break

Firefox has been able to block all third-party / cross-site cookies for ages. It's just not the default because it breaks some sites. But dive into the settings and you can easily set it to block all cross-site cookies, or even all cookies if you prefer.

I’m confused. Didn’t this start at the beginning of last year?
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-protection/

Mine has been blocking for years now. It's already there, just not on by default. It does break some sites so am assuming that's the reason. I just got use to the fact some sites will stop working and moved on.

It's been an option for as long as I can remember. I suppose they are leaving the default until websites adapt to chromes changes.

They will likely remove them soon I suppose. And it's easier to leave the option available in case it breaks someone's use-case until they fix it.

I think they took a different approach and block known trackers but not all cookies.
- Blocking third-party cookies is a more effective way to protect user privacy than blocking tracking cookies, because third-party cookies can be used to track users across multiple websites.
  
  Yes, but known 3rd party tracking cookies are already blocked. It's not like these tracking sites pop up every day, but the list is updated when new ones are found. Meanwhile, 3rd party cookies for legitimate uses are allowed.
  Whereas Google just blocked them all with no regard to their purpose.
  You can also choose to block all 3rd party cookies in Firefox, although it might break certain sites. And you can also keep 3rd party cookies (that are more functional than tracking) but maintain a different copy for each website so they aren't effective at tracking you.
  Firefox gives you a lot of choice.

money

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