Firefox V 85.0 Adds Protection Against Supercookies

[engine]

With the arrival of Firefox 85, it now protects against supercookies by reducing their effectiveness.

User tracking is becoming more sophisticated and the abuse means that one of the basic ways of reducing bandwidth by, for example, an image used on multiple pages is loaded once and shared on the multiple pages as loaded, eliminating the requirement for reloading the image. This is being abused by bad actors to track users around the web.

n fact, there are many different caches trackers can abuse to build supercookies. Firefox 85 partitions all of the following caches by the top-level site being visited: HTTP cache, image cache, favicon cache, HSTS cache, OCSP cache, style sheet cache, font cache, DNS cache, HTTP Authentication cache, Alt-Svc cache, and TLS certificate cache.

To further protect users from connection-based tracking, Firefox 85 also partitions pooled connections, prefetch connections, preconnect connections, speculative connections, and TLS session identifiers.

This partitioning applies to all third-party resources embedded on a website, regardless of whether Firefox considers that resource to have loaded from a tracking domain.

[blog.mozilla.org...]

[super70s]

Physician heal thyself!

Cookies have become a nightmare to get rid of in Firefox, do we really need a breakdown of every single cookie within a single domain? Sometimes there's 20 or more of them and I need to click for every one in a cookie manager plug in I use.

On vintage versions of Firefox all you needed to do was delete a domain you didn't like and it would get rid of every cookie for that domain.

[engine]

Getting rid of cookies in most browsers is challenging if you're trying to be selective. I wish there was an easier way as, at the moment, cookies can be quite pernicious.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

One day, lawmakers and regulators will discover the "local storage" thingy, and will realize that cookies were just peanuts.

[Achernar]

For chrome (I know this thread is not about chrome, but engine mentionned "browsers") I use an extension that lets you do whatever you want with cookies (edit/delete/save/restore). All listed & sorted by domain name. But as JorgeV wrote, there is also local storage which is not handled. It's a shame.

I don't want to advertise here, I can PM it's name for those interested.

[tangor]

Been killing LSOs for quite a while ... but they are getting better at injecting them on your system so it's a never ending battle.

Ordinary cookies are deleted each time browser closes (find in settings) which clears a lot of trash during the day.

[RhinoFish]

SuperCookies, oooh, so scary.
I hope they don't have TerrificTacos next, what will I do!

[Achernar]

I think using a good adblocker also helps getting rid of these things (by mostly not getting them at all).
I tend to whitelist some sites (this one is), but I browse mostly ad-free. For me these tracking libs are the things that take up most of the resources (cpu & memory) on my computer, and the loading time of the page (when viewing the network tab in the developper tools) is reduced from 45s - 1min (and sometimes much more) to 3-4s. No remorse at all.

[explorador]

Most people are not aware about what cookies mean, and how the use of the so called "free services and free resources" on many CDN's also use cookies. As said many times there is no such thing as free (at least not from big players).