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Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

blog.tomayac.com

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Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#3

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

There's an extension called cookie autodelete that does that. https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#4

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

What if legislators had targeted the ~3 browsers instead of the countless websites to enforce their policy? Things would actually work on a technical level, and we wouldn't be bombarded with dozens of useless cookie warnings. Would have been nice.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#5

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

Similar to suggestions that Android offer the option to provide fake location data to apps that require it without good reason: It's a fantastic idea and seems easy to implement, but might make it less painful for users to opt out of all the tracking that makes the internet so friendly to advertisers and other groups who would like to surveil your activity.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#6

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

Yes. And instead of requiring sites to ask "accept cookies", let it be a browser option when the site attempts to store cookies, like "OK for 10 minutes".

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#7

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

This is loosely what Firefox's temporary containers [0] extension does. Each tab (with options to control whether a tab spawned from a parent tab should inherit the cookie-jar context of the parent) gets its own temporary context. I don't recall whether it clears the jar on navigating away, but you can have that jar cleared when the tab is closed, and you can configure new jars when opening a new tab to a new site origin (i.e. domain).

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#9

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

That's effectively what Incognito does, except not at that granularity to make it simpler for users to understand.

It probably can't be every site being separate since that breaks a number of things sites do (like opening 3p windows to complete transactions), but it could probably be done in some kind of logical group manner. Maybe by using different window colors to signify the partitions.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#10

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

Firefox Focus on Android basically does that by default.

If you set it as default browser then all links you click will be openend there. Hit the back button when you're done and everything is deleted.

Another use case is if you quickly want to open some website to look something up: open the website, maybe click a few links, and when you're done everything is wiped.

You can keep a regular Firefox (or Chrome or whatever) for surfing to those websites where you want to keep some state.

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