Firefox enables full protection against cookies by default

Mozilla has announced the default enabling of full protection against cookies (Full Cookie Protection) for all users of firefox on desktop beyond private browsing and strict tracking protection settings.

With Total Cookie Protection, Firefox apparently wins an important point in its particular battle against the endless Chromium clones, which are led by Chrome and Edge (both proprietary). Marshall Erwin, head of security at Mozilla, has said that Firefox is now “the most secure and private among the largest browsers available for Windows and Mac” (Mozilla and its habit of neglecting Linux users, who are the most loyal to it).

Total Cookie Protection sounds great, but what is it really? Well, it is a feature created to prevent cross-tracking of cookies by websites. To do this, what it does is isolate the cookies used by a website in its own “jar”, thus preventing them from being tracked by other websites.. In this way, for example, Facebook is prevented from having access to the cookies generated and stored after visiting Amazon. The following drawing published by Mozilla explains in a simple way how total protection against cookies works.

In the image you can see that, before the implementation of Total Cookie Protection, all websites had access to all cookies generated and stored through browsing, but with the protection activated, websites only have access to their own cookies. cookies, thus reinforcing the privacy of the user by apparently impeding their cross-tracking.

Mozilla explains that “this approach strikes a balance between removing the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies, in particular the ability to track you, and allowing those cookies to fulfill their less intrusive use cases (for example, to provide accurate analytics)”.

It is important to note that the web as we know it would be much less practical and more difficult to manage without cookies, so the question is not whether they should exist or not, but how they are used. This protection recently enabled by default in Firefox opens the door, at least in theory, to force a more ethical use of cookies by reducing the scope for certain anti-privacy practices that have become all too common.

Total Cookie Protection in Firefox for Linux.

Firefox’s situation has been critical for years. Mozilla’s browser slept too long to end up vastly outclassed not only by the ubiquitous Google Chrome, but also by Microsoft Edge in recent times. The improvements it has made over the course of the last few months are not helping it to come back.

Total Cookie Protection, which is also enabled by default on Linux, is an important point for Firefox, but Seeing that the most used web browser is Google Chrome, the conclusion one reaches is that the majority of users do not demand privacy, but rather fluidity and quality with the browsing experience.and this is where Mozilla’s product continues to falter against Chromium and its derivatives.