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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#151

Post by eitland »

devenblake wrote: post #108
f430 wrote: post #77

is it just me or more people switching to Firefox these days?

Not sure. People on-line are switching but I haven't been able to convince many off-line - Chrome is necessary for a lot of poorly coded sites.

> Chrome is necessary for a lot of poorly coded sites.

Just like IE was.

And just like in the IE days some of us are cheering enthusiastically for every better alternative while others are defend the incumbent alternative :-)

It will take time but if we all do something sooner or lesser the old "best viewed in IE6/Chrome" websites become an embarrassment to management and then it will get fixed ;-)

Edit: Same will probably (IMO) happen with WhatsApp now and possible (again IMO) even Facebook and Google if they don't catch the drift soon. I can sense a massive discontent with them everywhere and for at least a 3 different reasons: spying, ux and functionality regressions and also because of their stance on politics (ironically I think large groups on all sides of politics want to bludgeon those companies over various issues and few except investors really love them).

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#152

Post by pradn »

biryani_chicken wrote: post #120
pradn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question about pihole: is it possible to turn off blocking for a website? Do you have to log into the pihole web interface to do that? I often go to websites where some crucial functionality is blocked by my adblocker (ublock origin), where I have to turn it off for that site.

I just stop using sites that gimp themselves when I use an adblocker. There's tons of alternatives for most things.

There aren't always alternatives - think shopping for certain items, government forms.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#153

Post by monadic3 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #131
biryani_chicken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just stop using sites that gimp themselves when I use an adblocker. There's tons of alternatives for most things.

How do you use the web when you can't click on links? I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.

> I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.

It gets easier over time.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#154

Post by WorldMaker »

jrmann100 wrote: post #50

Does this make Firefox's Multi-Account Containers obsolete? I just finished setting the smart cookie-grouping extension up, but it seems like this serves a functionally similar purpose.

Multi-Account Containers remains important for managing "real" cookies used as intended (signed in account information, for instance). These "supercookies" are parts of the web experience abused for tracking and at least partly orthogonal to what Multi-Account Containers helps manage.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#155

Post by sholladay »

paulpauper wrote: post #6

Twitter uses these type of cookies. They even use cookies that do not contain any reference to the twitter domain. It is how they track people who have been suspended on the platform

I haven't looked into Twitter's cookies specifically, but if I understood you correctly, I think you're misinformed about what the domain of a cookie does. It's normal to not specify the domain because that's the only way to exclude subdomains, which is important for security.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#156

Post by hinkley »

kristofferR wrote: post #73
ogre_codes wrote: post #48

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

A much more significant performance issue with web tracking is usually the absurd amount of JS loaded. It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.

I worked a contract where we slaved to get our load time down to some respectable number, and then they launched the site and load time was multiplied by just the analytics software (it was a company website, they weren’t running 3rd party ads).

How demotivating. It was time to start thinking about moving on anyway, but I basically stopped trying to pursue contract renewal at that point. All that work (and uncomfortable meetings) so Google could triple our load time.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#157

Post by jahewson »

abcd_f wrote: post #68

Per-site caching negates the principal selling point of centrally-hosted JS and resources, including fonts. The convenience remains, but all speed-related perks (due to the resources being reused from earlier visits to unrelated sites) are no more... which is actually great, because it reduces the value that unscrupulous free CDN providers can derive from their "properties". It also means that I can remove fonts.goog…

Per-site caching is the new norm. Shared caches are vulnerable to timing attacks that infer your web history. It’s a shame but that’s just the reality of caching. Shared caches were never as useful as claimed due to the large numbers of versions of most resources.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#158

Post by oivey »

ogre_codes wrote: post #131
biryani_chicken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just stop using sites that gimp themselves when I use an adblocker. There's tons of alternatives for most things.

How do you use the web when you can't click on links? I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.

Very few sites are broken with ad blocking. If you click on one, you just press the back button. No need for a mental blacklist.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#159

Post by greggyb »

nixpulvis wrote: post #98
jrmann100 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably Firefox's own Firefox Multi-Account Containers[0]. Groups caches/cookies into designated categories for each tab (personal, work, shopping, etc.), with smart recognition for assigned sites. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Someone should do a study on the performance impacts of using something like this on all sites for various kinds of "typical" web browsing profiles. I'm honestly guessing a lot of the losses would be in the noise for me personally.

There is an additional Firefox extension that integrates with multi-account containers, Temporary Containers. This is highly configurable - I have it create a new container for every domain I visit, with a couple of exceptions that are tied to permanent containers.

I run that on my personal devices.

At work, there is so much in terms of SSO the amount of redirects that happen mean that temp-container-per-domain breaks all sorts of workflows, so I go without on the work machine.

I notice no major difference between these two configurations, although I'm sure that there would be things that are measurable, though imperceptible.

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