Mozilla blocking third-party cookies
Total cookie protection is also known under the technical term state partitioning is supposed to prevent cross-site cookie tracking probably the most common method for web tracking.
To better understand what has changed. Let’s look at how cookies were managed before, When you browsing the web, Visited websites can store cookies in the browser which are mostly used for saving logins and settings.
When the same advertising network has ads embedded on multiple websites. They can set and read their cookies on each of those websites and therefore collect a list of sites that each browser (of course User) has accessed in the past.
This easy tracking method was partially made harder over time by, for example, blocking third-party cookies, but blocking all third-party cookies can break some websites with legitimate users like single sign-on services from Google or Facebook Or embedded content like tweets.
That’s why Firefox doesn’t block all third-party cookies by default. But only the ones from the most common identified trackers this obviously requires to keep and regularly update a list of these trackers, but that’s time-consuming and never complete.
Here’s where total cookie protection comes in websites, and their embedded third party content are now isolated into separate self-containing Pockets for third-party tracker can only access the cookies associated with each top-level (current website on tab) website it is on, which prevents cross-site cookie tracking this also applies to every other embedded Third Party Source.
So how are legitimate third-party sources still able to work for one? There’s a new API to request access to third-party cookies from the user. There are also predefined access policies for the most common scenarios like Dimension single sign-on Services users get an overview of the permissions for the current website by clicking the lock icon and are able to revoke any previously granted permissions as well instead of Firefox keeping an endless list of tracking domains. This approach seems to be a more Universal solution to cross-site tracking total cookie protection.
Firefox has a container tabs feature that isolates tabs from each other. Mozilla introduces new major anti-tracking features the market around browser privacy seems to become more competitive, especially because of Safari, and Brave hopefully end-users will profit from that. I’m sure we will see something similar and other web browsers soon.
Also read