Firefox 91 Pushes Privacy With Stronger New Cookie-clearing Option

WIth the release of Firefox 91 on Tuesday, Mozilla has introduced a bigger hammer for smashing the cookies that websites, advertisers and tracking companies can use to record your online behavior. From a report: The new feature, called enhanced cookie clearing, is designed to block tracking not just from a website, but also from third parties whose code appears on the site. The technology is designed to let you clear cookies for a particular website but also the more aggressive "supercookies" designed to evade lesser privacy protections. The feature is an option if you enable Firefox's strict mode for cookie handling, which partitions website data into separate storage containers. "You can easily recognize and remove all data a website has stored on your computer, without having to worry about leftover data from third parties embedded in that website," Mozilla said in a blog post.

Per site storage

[slack_justyb]

For those wondering what's changed, per site storage of cookies and cached data. Originally, when you deleted cookies for a site it would just delete *.somesite.com. Now it stores everything that somesite.com used, like 3rd party cookies, and so when you delete *.somesite.com, it deletes all cookies and data related the storage for that site. The drawback is that you eat hard drive space (I mean if that's actually a concern for you) and memory usage, since a common piece of data like something image.facebook.com, now has multiple copies related to the sites that you visited.

Here's Mozilla's blog [mozilla.org] talking about the feature. Interested in everyone's take on this feature. Everyone who came here to moan how their favorite add-on no longer works and that Firefox is in a tail-spin, start some other thread.

Re:

[Z00L00K]

Now if they just could make the "User-Agent" string more neutral. That's one of the key vectors these days for uniqueness detection.

There are other things as well like Javascript reporting back what plugins that exists etc.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

I feel like a Merkel Tree for the database storage would de-dup the larger chunks of data and save memory. But you'd still need a normal key-value store to look up the hash for the merkel.

(I'm sure the Mozilla folks are way more involved in data structure than I)

Re:

[Bu11etmagnet]

> I feel like a Merkel Tree

Leave Angela out of this.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

Ha! Yeah, my mistake. I kept fighting the spell check and gave up out of laziness. FWIW it's Merkle tree [wikipedia.org].

tl;dr - It's tree made as a hash of a hash of each block. It is a type of content addressable data, if you know the hash then you can find the data. If you change the data then there must be a new hash. If you only changed one block, you only need to re-calculate up the tree to the root and don't need the entire file. (which you could distribute "in the cloud" if you wish).

I went with whitelisting.

[Gravis Zero]

The cookie tracking situation is easy to ignore but I ran an experiment and it turns out that it's not hard to just domain whitelist for cookies. It breaks some sites but adding an "allow for session" rule for the site domain is usually all you have to do. For commonly used sites (e.g. slashdot) then you add a full exception for the domain. However, you do get hit over the head with "we use cookies" messages/popups so you need to install "I don't care about cookies" [mozilla.org] or suffer eternally.

I've been going a

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

They should build in something like Cookie Auto Delete, but maybe make it a bit more user friendly by automatically whitelisting sites you visit frequently.

Re:

[Retired ICS]

If this was ALL THAT CHANGED then there would be no problem. Unfortunately, those completely insignificant and useless changes have been completely destroyed by all the other fucking foolery that has completely fucked up Firefox beyond recognition and usability.

Re:

[Waccoon]

The drawback is that you eat hard drive space

Modern web design is the very definition of eating space. I can't believe I'm encountering web sites that transfer several megabytes per view, let alone cached.

What I'd like to know is when somebody will release a cookie whitelist, so I can clear all the junk without clearing specific sites I want to keep. Given that we all know blacklist policies don't work, I can't believe whitelist policies aren't available.

And brings back hated "floating tabs"

[pepsikid]

i.e. INVISIBLE tabs. There are no more tabs. Just a blank bar with icons and text on it. So they've stripped out visual cues as "an improvement" the surly bastards. And a quick run-through in Settings shows while I can click on check-boxes, and sometimes lists move, I don't see check marks.

THUMBS DOWN, FIREFOX

Re:And brings back hated "floating tabs"

[Alumoi]

Enable proton in about:config and you'll see them.
The fuckers have finally found a way to force proton on us.

Re:

[Mikkeles]

So, I guess tabs under address is still a no-go (without writing/loading css).

Re:

[thegarbz]

All 6 UI Nazis on Slashdot will be outraged. The rest of the users don't care.

Firefox lost another million users in a week

[xack]

Data.firefox.com reveals that Firefox has fallen to a 2 year low, below the 200m mark for weeks now. Its obvious that the public at large are rejecting the Windows ME tier ui of Firefox and fleeing for Chromium browsers. A tiny minority might use Pale Moon, but most head back the Googleplex and would rather be tracked than have to deal with a fisher price browser.

Re:

[aerogems]

Except, by and large, Firefox has been just shamelessly copying Chrome for years now on the UI front. You look at Chrome and Firefox side by side, and ignore unimportant differences like color schemes, and you see Firefox is virtually a 1:1 clone of Chrome on the UI.

And let's not forget that people called Windows XP a fisher price OS and hated it when it first came out. Wasn't until around SP2 that people started liking it, mostly because hardware, specifically IGPs, started catching up. Then it ended up st

Re: Firefox lost another million users in a week

[ArmoredDragon]

Was that spartan edge or was it edgeium? Reason I ask is because the older edge was a piece of junk, and it turns out the reason Microsoft abandoned it was because the office online team was wanting to add collaboration features that Google was able to pull off with chrome on its own gsuite, yet edge couldn't offer similar features that office online could use. This was mainly caused by it being a UWP app, which meant that in order to add features to edge, they first had to make them possible in the shitty

Helps a small percentage of FF users

[93 Escort Wagon]

I assume most people who are still using Firefox are also using either uBlock Origin or NoScript. Either way, the third-party scripts aren't running - which means they're already not setting cookies.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Yep :)

Re:

[scdeimos]

I wasn't aware that uBlock Origin and NoScript do anything at all about cookies. There is the purpose-built add-on, though: Cookie AutoDelete https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]

Removed ability to disable Proton

[cj9er]

This really chaps my a$$, removing this ability (and just Proton in general is horrible)

FireFox 91 is also the new ESR: ESR91

[williamyf]

This will replace the current ESR (ESR78) in Nov this year. So this release is also importan in that regard.

So:
- Firefox ESR 91 is the first ESR without NPAPI plumbing, which means, no Flash.
- KaiOS development is aligned with ESR, which means this release is important for people in emerging markets that depend on KaiOS.
- Firefox mobile development used to be aligned with the desktop ESR. Nowadays is not, but it they become aligned again, this release will be significant for it as well.

I am a user of ESR, so I can(not) wait to try this out, come Nov this year to try it out.

Just keeps getting worse

[willoughby]

What's the current consensus on SeaMonkey?

Re:

[rossdee]

I use SeaMonkey as my primary browser.

I do use Firefox for some things, but that is an older version, 88 I think. I wonder how long I will be allowed to do that.

We've had this for decades.

[jonadab]

So basically a "clear all cookies" button, right?

Maybe in ten more years, they'll invent the option to automatically drop all cookies whenever the user closes the browser window. And block pop-ups.

Just so you know

[mcnster]

I will continue to use Firefox until the heat death of the universe regardless of how many times they trip me up with yet another brand-new sparkly UI. Or until someone else comes along with a browser that does more for the Common Good than all the pr0n and cat videos combined.

Re:

[Don'tJoin]

Probably me too. Sure, it's annoying when things break, but what are my options, get in a flee-infested bed with the disease ridden whore of mammon, or dance with someone obviously still endowed with two left internet feet.

It's not that difficult

[DontBeAMoran]

Any idiot should know how to clear cookies [youtube.com].

What a Pile of Shit

[Retired ICS]

I wish these cock sucking useless fucks would STOP fucking about with things that work properly. Everytime these Firefox nutbar shit fucks change something they completely and totally fuck everything up.

So now with this update the display is defective (checkboxes are missing)
So now with this update the display is defective (tab / title bar colours disappeared)
So now with this update the display is defective (everything now has an acre of blankspace around it)

It is become a total complete and utter pile of

Re:

[schwit1]

Please eat a Snickers [youtube.com]

It's about uniqueness, not persistence.

[devslash0]

This is a good start but don't forget that supercookie technologies can easily regenerate unique IDs based on a great number of factors - location, system, browser configuration, etc. What we really need is a middle layer which randomises those distinct values and serves 3rd parties a different set of input data every time so that generated user IDs become useless. That's the only way to stop tracking.