Firefox Starts Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Mozilla today announced a slew of privacy improvements. The company has turned on Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks cookies from third-party trackers in Firefox, by default. Mozilla has also improved its Facebook Container extension, released a Firefox desktop extension for its rebranded Lockwise password keeper, and updated Firefox Monitor with a dashboard for multiple email addresses.

If you download a fresh copy of Firefox today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be on by default as part of the Standard setting. That means third-party tracking cookies are blocked without users having to change a thing. You will notice Enhanced Tracking Protection working if there is a shield icon in the address bar. If you click on the shield icon and open the Content Blocking section and then Cookies, you'll see a Blocking Tracking Cookies section. There you can see the companies listed as third-party cookies and trackers that Firefox has blocked. You can also turn off blocking for a specific site. The feature focuses on third-party trackers (the ad industry) while allowing first-party cookies (logins, where you last left off, and so on). Mozilla says it is enabling Enhanced Tracking Protection by default because most users don't change their browser settings.

So important that we post it twice

[thesjaakspoiler]

One more reason to ditch that Chrome monster.

Finally the way it should be.

[dicobalt]

Thank You.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy flinging around childish vulgarity like "horseshit"...

A scientifically and psychologically legitimate term like "retarded" applies because that's what you'd have to be to not notice the anti-privacy behaviour staring you in the face with Firefox. The fact that you couldn't figure that out confirms my suspicion was true after all.

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Who cares? You block me, you disappear, 3rd party cookies or not.

Also, you show how much you value your users.

I still find it hilarious to see the bunch of spyware-infested US websites sites posting a 403 error page that says "You, the user, are our most important priority, therefore we fuck your privacy and will block you because we won't be bothered to comply with any privacy regulations like the GDPR". They truly shows care and concern. Well, you know what, fuck you too.

Even the "Error 403 while trying t

Re:

[Luthair]

Safari did a while ago, at the time some ad networks complained but ...

Marketers will hate this.

[WCMI92]

Because they think that your eyes should be forced open to watch their ads. That follow you around the internet.

Doesn't happen on TV with my IRL Adblocker v1.0

[thesjaakspoiler]

I close my eyes and cover my ears during the commercial breaks 16 times an hour on TV. I should try to look the other way when browsing a webpage.

Please pay for editors...

[msauve]

...because the current /. ones can't even avoid duplicating stories which are still on the main page.

But then again, maybe their repetition is based on being trained to repeat "You want fries with that?"

Only third-party cookies?

[Trogre]

Pity it's not blocking dupes [slashdot.org] yet.

Re: Do most users even care

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference being Chrome is shovelware and people download FF willfully.

I wish they would disable all autoplay videos

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would disable all autoplay videos by default, with sound or without. I keep adding filters for yahoo finance video sources and every day they add more sources. Video became new animated gif of the internet. There should be an option to make all content click to play.

Good luck with that: Pure CSS motion JPEG

[tepples]

I wish they would disable all autoplay videos by default, with sound or without.

In order to disable autoplay videos, you have to detect autoplay videos. If you disable autoplaying WebM and MP4, ad networks will fall back to GIF. If you disable that too, there are ways to make JPEG and PNG move [pineight.com] with either JavaScript or CSS.

Re:

[Known Nutter]

Safari doesn't seem to have a problem disabling auto-play video.

Re:

[tepples]

How many pages in the test suite cause Safari to play video?

Re:I wish they would disable all autoplay videos

[Carcass666]

Try going to about:config and setting media.autoplay.default to 1. The values are kind of counter-intuitive (0 = allowed, 1 = blocked, 2 = ask) but seems to work on most sites I hit. YMMV

Is there a list or do they guess?

[sabbede]

This is something I wonder about with 3rd party cookies - how do they identify what's a 3rd party cookie vs a 1st party cookie (same company) from a different domain? Will an att.com cookie be blocked on AT&T's directvnow.com domain because it isn't the same domain, or will it be allowed because there's a list of 3rd party cookies to block? Or is there some other method, like looking at certificates or whois data?

Just like RSS feeds

[guitarsynth]

Why We can not have nice things