Things not available when someone blocks all cookies • Hacker News Board

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#11

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 12:40 PM UTC

techdmn wrote: post #5

josephcsible wrote: post #2

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.

This feature is long overdue in both Android and iOS. The amount of location data being harvested is outrageous.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#12

Post by smallerfish » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

The Atlantic is really annoying in this respect. When you open an article in Firefox Focus, it fully renders for a moment, but then apparently some javascript loads at the end of the cycle which clears the page.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#13

Post by eterevsky » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #2

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?

Assuming the website wants to do something on the first user's visit, it would start doing it on every page load. Letting the website know that the user has disabled cookies can help avoid it and improve user experience.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#14

Post by nerdponx » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 12:57 PM UTC

I think the problem here is "potentially blocked".

How do you know what's potentially blocked? Maybe it's listed clearly somewhere in the browser docs, or maybe it's not. Did they change it between versions? Did you even know about this issue in the first place?

I know people like to think of checked exceptions as a failed experiment from the dark past of object oriented programming, but this situation is a great example of statically-typed (or at least statically-checkable) side effects are a huge improvement in code safety.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#15

Post by eointierney » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

smallerfish wrote: post #12

The Atlantic is really annoying in this respect. When you open an article in Firefox Focus, it fully renders for a moment, but then apparently some javascript loads at the end of the cycle which clears the page.

Readermode fixes this for me

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#16

Post by paulhodge » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

Yeah, adding try/catch around those has been a good practice for a while. I think there was a time when, if the site was running in a private window in Safari, localStorage would also throw exceptions.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#17

Post by jefftk » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

> All I am using is some innocent localStorage and IndexedDB to persist user settings like the values of the sliders or the chosen color scheme.

When you turn off cookies you're telling the browser not to let sites persist information. Otherwise, whatever goals you had in disabling cookies would just be worked around through these other technologies.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#18

Post by hoseja » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

eterevsky wrote: post #13

josephcsible wrote: post #2

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?

Assuming the website wants to do something on the first user's visit, it would start doing it on every page load. Letting the website know that the user has disabled cookies can help avoid it and improve user experience.

Letting the website know anything at all lets it track you, as we learn time and time again.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#19

Post by jeroenhd » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

g_p wrote: post #7

josephcsible wrote: post #2

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 or…

How well does this extension work together with the Multi-Account Containers addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...)?

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#20

Post by moffkalast » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #17

> All I am using is some innocent localStorage and IndexedDB to persist user settings like the values of the sliders or the chosen color scheme. When you turn off cookies you're telling the browser not to let sites persist information. Otherwise, whatever goals you had in disabling cookies would just be worked around through these other technologies.

Thing is though, it can be worked around as long as js is enabled.

Client side fingerprinting plus server side data storage and you get the same functionality in a roundabout way.