Technology

Advertisers track you with device fingerprinting and behaviour profiling now. Firefox doesn't do much to obscure the more advanced methods of tracking.

There is still plenty of fish for advertisers, sadly.

Hahahahaha so it doesn't break anything that still relies on cookies, but neuters the ability to share them.

That's awesome

Isn't this basically Firefox's version of the third party cookie block that Chrome rolled out a few months ago? Or am I missing something here?

I mean, it's good news either way but I just want to know if this is somehow different or better.

For those who don't care to read the full article

Or even the whole title, really

Basically creates a fake VM like environment for each site.

I don't know why this wasn't the case long ago.

I hope so! It's a wonderful side of the Internet to be on

Yup. Nobody else gets those cookies.

IIRC an iframe contents is treated as a separate window, so cookies aren’t shared either

We'll have to see what happens but what you are talking about is what Mozilla calls Third-Party Cookies and... they are aware of it.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-firefox-tracking-protection#:~:text=Third%2Dparty%20cookies%20are%20cookies,considered%20a%20third%2Dparty%20cookie.

I can't entirely tell if that means they will be put in the facebook cookie jar or if it will be put in the TentaclePorn Dot Org (don't go there, it is probably a real site and probably horrifying) cookie jar. If the former? Then only facebook themselves have that which... is still a lot better I guess? If the latter then that is basically exactly what we all want but a lot of sites are gonna break (par for the course with Firefox but...).

They are usually separate things. Cookies are produced/saved locally, to be read in the next visit (by the same website or maany websites basically forever unless you use firefox containers or at least clear them once in a while). There's also local storage which is different but can also be used to identify you across the web. Ads, trackers, all of these categories are often made of many small components: you read a single article on a "modern" newspaper website, hundreds of connection are being made, different tiny scripts or icons or images are being downloaded (usually from different subdomains for different purposes but there's no hard rule). It's possible to block one thing and not another. For example I can block Google Analytics (googletagmanager) which is a tracker, but accept all of Google's cookies.

Firefox is awesome.

Looks like the article was updated today. I'm guessing this was originally covering an announcement for a future rollout and now it's finally happening?