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Mozilla Backtracks On Third-Party Cookie Blocking
An anonymous reader writes "Remember when Mozilla announced that it would soon block third-party cookies by default? Not so fast. According to a new behind-the-scenes report in the San Francisco Chronicle, 'it's not clear when it will happen — or if it will at all.' Mozilla's leadership is apparently no longer committed to the feature, and the related Cookie Clearinghouse collaboration is delayed well into 2014. Who's to blame? According to Dan Auerbach, Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 'The ad industry has a ton of people, basically lobbyists, who spent a lot of time trying to convince Mozilla this was bad for the economy... I think they were somewhat successful.' Not a good showing for the purportedly pro-user organization."
More like ONE organization (Google). At one point, they were getting over 90% of their funding from Google alone. I imagine that may have had something to do with this reversal.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
That's odd, because I've been running with third-party cookies blocked for years with no obvious problems.
humm... why fork?
the option to manually disable third party cookies is still there, it's not just enabled by default. Other than ads companies, big sites also use cookies between their multiple sites, changing that default could break big sites not ready for that change, throwing even more pressure for mozilla not change the default (breaking current sites is always very dangerous and tricky)
but anyway, firefox is one of the most privacy oriented browsers. If you install the add-ons noscript + requestpolicy and/or ghostery you are blocking almost all ways of tracking. add the "better privacy" to the list to also remove flash cookies (if you allow then) and be done.
having all this by default is hard, not only because the user-friendly, but because could rage many companies against mozilla if done alone... now try to talk to google to do the same to chrome (and by the way, disable the auto-submit of everything one writes to the url bar to the google servers)
Higuita