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Mozilla Removes Individual Cookie Management in Firefox 60 (ghacks.net)
Martin Brinkmann, writing for Ghacks: The most recent version of Firefox Nightly, currently at version 60, comes with changes to Firefox's cookie management. Mozilla merged cookie settings with site data in the web browser which impacts how you configure and manage cookie options. If you run Firefox 59 or earlier, you can load about:preferences#privacy to manage privacy related settings in Firefox. If you set the history to "use custom settings for history" or "remember history", you get an option manage cookie settings and to remove individual cookies from Firefox. A click on the link or button opens a new browser window in which all set cookies are listed. You can use it to find set cookies, look up information, remove selected or all cookies. Mozilla engineers changed this in recent versions of Firefox 60 (currently on the Nightly channel).
I often need to whack a broken cookie for a single site. Now I have to blow out all my logins (and worse, my user's logins) just to fix one bad cookie? Are they nuts? You can kiss FF goodbye in any environment more complex than grandma's surfing the net. Everybody else is going to get fed up the first time their IT whacks everything instead of the one busted cookie.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is why you never let your programmers program your applications. No good can come of it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is fine with me as long as I can deny all 3rd party cookies and then remove all history every time I close Firefox (multiple times per day).
p.s. I also run gmail as a separate user that doesn't have access to my real account's files.
When is Mozilla going to realize that Firefox got popular because of developers and power users and the fact that they keep doing things like this that are hostile to developers and power users is a contributing factor to Firefox's decline in usage?
Seriously? I use this all the time. This REALLY pisses me off. Sure, someone will quickly make an add-on, but basic core functionality shouldn't depend on a pile of third-party add-ons.
First they broke a lot of extensions including ScrapBook which I've used for a very long time. So I reverted back to 56 which was a pain but doable, hoping there would be some upgrade path. Nope, the new architecture doesn't support a lot of the plugin features and I'm hearing that repeatedly from multiple places. They got rid of the status bar and I'm using an extension so I can read mouseover events easier. Now they're making it difficult to delete individual cookies? WTF, Firefox team. You know, it's been a nice run and all, but I'm spending more time keeping it working the same way than I should be. Enough is enough.
Firefox? That browser ppl used to use before there was Chrome?
The option is still there. You just have to press the "Settings" button in the Cookies section. Weird choice of words, I'll admit that. Some Mozilla UI designer needs to get in trouble, that's for damn sure.
Track every change Mozilla has made to their once popular (with tech informed types) browser- and you'll see the clearest of pattern. Orwellian google/facebook style attacks on user privacy under the EXCUSE of dumbing down things for the 'convenience' of mr average.
We have enough sample points from Mozilla's methods to draw a VERY accurate graph- and what it shows is disturbing to the nth degree. A browser built for the NSA and GCHQ.
Lying dribbling statist shills will tell you how all those missing pro-privacy features are still available if only you use some arcane combination of commands- which is neither here nor there. Military grade psy-ops informs that when a feature is so obscure or inconvenient, it just isn't used regardless of how much in theory its use would be desired by a user.
And this is the point. Mozilla's owners understand psychology- so when they want something killed, 'killed' is determined by the reduction of users using that functionality (using any means) after the change. I recently killed youtube cookies using exactly the method now removed from Mozilla. So I get why Mozilla is removing the function.
For the 1% who'll bother to update cookie killing extensions or learn the arcane methods of Mozilla, obviously nothing Mozilla can do can impact them- BUT that's cos that 1% could just as easily jump to waterfox or another non-crippled browser. Mozilla isn't about that 1%- no-one ever is. Mozilla is about controlling the experience and options of the majority- the 99%. The 99% that the NSA and GCHQ desire to own.
The owners of Mozilla are proud Deep State scum. They see the world in terms of 'masters' and 'slaves'. Understand that every pro-clinton shill on every tech forum has the goal of making you think otherwise.
on a click bait-y headline. Though to be honest after the $h!t show that was their extension API changes I was honestly prepared for something that boneheaded.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Mozilla managed to drive Firefox under the ground now they are just torching the remains. Used the software as my main browser since it was called firebird. I hung in as long as I could switched to chrome long after everyone else on the team 8 month ago. Now enjoying watching this train wreck...
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Someone, most likely a consortium of ad tracking companies is paying Mo$illa to cripple their browser. First it was getting rid of XUL now it is even crippling the Fisher Price extentions to get rid of fundemental user interface controls that have existed for decades. It will only be a matter of time before they try to corrupt Waterfox and Pale Moon too.
The A/C controls are now located in the trunk. For your own good, of course.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Thought I was the only one.
Is the ability to selectively clear cookies holding back Firefox development that you're making this function a 3rd-party add-on? Really? (An add-on that may not even exist for some time while it's being developed/debugged.)
What incentive do I have to switch back to Firefox from Chrome where I already have to rely on a external add-on to manage cookies? I'm thinking there isn't any reason to come back.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
and that's good enough for me
should be good enough for you,too
Firefox has been racing to the bottom for the past few years, and is already almost unusable as of the latest builds. It's slow, buggy, and becoming as limited and useless as Chrome.
The faster it craters, the better, as only that will offer us the realistic prospect of a new competitor.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I have disabled automatic updates on my FF58. I never use it for anything requiring a login anyway, I just use it so I can squash annoying/overbearing advertisements anyway, but this, if true, will mean I will be ditching Firefox, or simply just using a progressively more and more outdated version. That said...
All good things come to an end. The internet seems to have peaked, and now it's just going to go slowly downhill with the end of net neutrality, so it's time to figure out what things are done WITH the net now, and how to do it without the internet again as it was in the old days, and get used once more to doing things that way once again. It was great while it lasted but I think in the near future I'm going to be using my computer increasingly offline, to prepare for a future in which the internet is simply not safe to use, not worth paying for, not worth the trouble.
Once upon a time, there was no internet, and I remember those days. Had a C64, and swapped files with friends on 5.25" floppy disks, and though these days it's more likely to be USB thumbdrives or CD-ROMS, things are heading back in that direction.
Seriously, I'm about done with all this high-tech bullshit. Going to trade-in my iPhone for a dumb phone and just be happy not to have to charge it every goddamned day, and not have it constantly distracting me with bullshit. It's gone to far and it's time to end it.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Mozilla XXmoves Individual Cookie Management in Firefox 60
The main point is that they are putting Site Data (the JavaScript APIs localStorage and siteStorage) and cookies together, since they are functionally the same thing: they let sites store persistent data on your computer.
So the new UI is organized by site, and shows you how big the data is, and how many cookies. And you can still pick and choose a site, and delete its data.
For now, it seems like the ability to delete some but not all of a site's cookies, and to inspect cookie values, is lost. As a developer I've done this kind of thing before, but it seems pretty damn marginal. Even I as a browser control freak probably won't miss it. Just delete the whole site's data, and you're new to them. And if you really want the ability back, I'm sure there will be extensions by day one.
Considering that up to now, you might have been carefully deleting some site's cookies, but had no way to look or delete their localstorage, this seems like an improvement.
That's all.
Taking away control from users because "they are too stupid to cope with that" insulting.
so fast when no one uses it
Mozilla is just following the trend of Apple and Gnome of removing functionality.
Mozilla have become a huge, bloated, bureaucratic organization, utterly divorced from their end-users.
To the surprise of absolutely no-one except perhaps Mozilla management, their product is crap, hated by users and has only survived this far because the alternatives - IE, Chrome - were worse, from a privacy perspective.
Moz will begin chipping away at this final advantage, because it's the single worst thing they could do right now, and companies like this somehow gravitate, inexorably, toward the worse possible choices.
As for me, I don't use the web much these days. Most of it is broken, because there are so many appalling web-sites out there.
The analysis of the interface change comes from a work-in-progress nightly version, yet the title makes it look like it refers to the final version. The feature has not been disabled, just moved around. Yet many readers are commenting as if yet another feature was missing from Firefox. Is there a deliberate attempt to paint Mozilla in the worse possible way to harm the project, or mere clickbait to catch eyeballs?
The back and forward buttons aren't removable anymore!
I always removed them since with the back and forward button of my mouse they serve no purpose, and clicking on small areas for such frequently used functions was always a stupid idea. Also, Esc and F5 serve well as stop/abort and reload keys. And I don't have a "start page" to set.
After the "update", all the buttons were back, and I had to remove them. Except those two buttons weren’t removable.
---
Dear Mozcolonslashslasha
FUCK YOU.
Sincerely,
all the actual humans who still somehow can't accept how utterly you ruined our once favorite browser, and aren’t insane enough to become Google livestock!
---
BTW: Vivaldi is a great alternative: Think all the things you loved about Opera (who, remember, invented all the cool things like tabs and mouse gestures and so on), around a Chromium core. A great alternative to everybody who's reluctantly using Chrome too.
The whole point of Phoenix (now Firefox) over Mozilla (SeaMonkey) was, that as little as possible was built-in. The add-on system was meant to be used by everyone, period. Using it without any add-ons was meant to make as little sense as using an operating system without any programs.
The problem is, that the add-ons that are still possible now, completely ruin that, as barely anything is still possible.
--- TS;WM (too short; want more): ---
Frankly, I think we should just all do it like with the Linux kernel, and provide the extensions as patch sets. Yes, it will required a proper conflict resolver to avoid one patch set messing things up for others, but at least EVERY feature would be possible, and old add-ons would be easily portable.
It would be even better under things like Gentoo, where you could just use the USE flags, to switch things on and off arbitrarily.
But still a far cry from what was THE WHOLE DAMN FUCKING POINT of Firefox, of course.
Wait and see?
They're removing features HERE AND NOW.
That' ain't fucking ok. NOW.
Mozilla is now on the cutting "Edge", or the way of the Dodo?
Meanwhile Waterfox is working fine.
Mozilla in bed with Soros spored NGO's, 0.0bama regime and Deep State censoring Free Speech worldwide. And they come with this garbage to facilitate user tracking more easily. Congratulation!
Mozilla's actions are at odds with their publicly professed goals.They hid third party cookies in the previous release and now want to do this. Why even waste time and resources on a user hostile action, how will these actions benefit users?
They are mainly sucking up to Google's interests and hide behind political answers when called out. Firefox now seems to exist more as token competition to Chrome in the browser marketplace so no one can accuse Google of being a monopoly.
We need a genuine open source alternative that places end user interests first than tokenism.
Where does Mozilla get most of its funding from?
Google. Or is it Alphabet?
At any rate, advertising dollars effectively fund Firefox developers to work on Firefox.
Individual cookie management and being able to easily discriminate on which sites get (or don't get) cookies makes it harder for Alphabet/Google to monetize Firefox users.
All of the changes to Firefox have been to make it harder for end-users to interfere with Alphabet/Google getting value out of your use of it.
It would be sadly ironic to "ditch Firefox" by switching to a non-free (proprietary, user-subjugating) browser in response to the lack of user control Firefox didn't give you in this build. If there's one thing we can say with certainty about proprietary software: users only get as much control as the proprietors want to give. There are a lot of examples showing how proprietary software is often malware. Technically less capable free software is a better choice than technically more capable proprietary software because of software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published software)—that freedom is the means by which technical issues can be resolved. One can make less capable software more capable by leveraging one's software freedom. One cannot add software freedom to proprietary software.
Digital Citizen
Keep making FF less and less appealing to web developers. Thanks, The Google Chrome Team.
I have a couple of news websites, that only allow you x number of "free" reads per month (local newspaper sites). But if you blow out the INDIVIDUAL cookie for that site, you can read 5 more. I made a shortcut to get to the cookie, then type in the cookie name to blow just the 3 cookies associated with that site. Now I have to blow them ALL out? WTH?
That is all.
The sooner the customer base reacts, the greater the chance this functionality change will be looked at and changed BEFORE it goes into release.
You seem pretty optimistic regarding Mozilla's ability to listen to their users and behave accordingly. What makes you think they would start doing that any time soon?
That's like a Mozilla design "Smart Toilets" collecting timestamp and temperature on every drop of your piss.
Firefox and Win 10 are created by perverts known as the CIA.
I honestly never realized just how compatible with the hysterical weirdos at GHacks this lot at Slashdot truly is. Screw what's actually going on, let's just rant and rave. Forget that the UI was already shit and needed an overhaul, and don't bother providing feedback because it'll just get ignored as we flame the devs rather than participating in the redesign. After all, we weren't personally consulted, which must mean it's an automatic insult and not an attempt to improve one of the less useful UIs that also happens to be the most prominent one for novices.
It took forever to convince work to allow Firefox, but eventually they allowed it, given there weren't really any other alternatives back then and IE was a security sieve. Now there's Chrome, which is also allowed at work but sucks balls compared to classic Firefox.
Once the Firefox extended version ends in April, it will be useless to use at work any more. At home I long ago switched to classic Firefox variants like Palemoon or Waterfox. But in this day and age when IE is perceived as more secure, and Chrome is now available, there's no freaking way work is going to allow a Palemoon or a Waterfox to be installed.
So Mozilla, you've screwed over the small but significant number of us who used to be happily using Firefox at work with extensions that kept it usable. I predict another huge dropoff in Firefox usage in April when we're all forced to stop using it at work because there's no way to make it usable anymore. Just the inability to banish tabs (loathe tabs) because the Classic extension doesn't work any more is enough for me to drop Firefox like a rock.
Did I mention I loathe tabs? Lots of us do. Until now, we had an extension we could use to banish them.
Lots of other reasons Firefox used to be better but I'm not going to list them all here. You'll find them listed in any thread extolling Palemoon or Waterfox.
I dread the choice at work being limited to IE or Chrome. But that's what you forced, Mozilla. Your browser used to be the standard others aspired to. It's now horrible.
They are going to keep pulling this stuff until FF is forked.
It worked for LibreOffice.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I'm not convinced that Brave will be able to pull it off, but I like some of what I see in the early stages.
You're in luck! Google and Facebook are in the business of sucking up everything they can.
I switched to Vivaldi. A little rough around the edges still but very usable. I get blink and extensions from the Chrome store (like Google Translate and the Tideways extension). In addition there is finer control over zoom increments and a whole bunch of other nice improvements over Chrome.
Looking forward to their sync implementation (coming soon) and Android app (coming later).
Mozilla was a mostly trusted browser in this world of distrustful apps, devices and user-hostile companies. Mozilla is headed in that direction. Uninstalling today.
wait a second, are they fucking high?
From the original article; "Update: Some commenters stated that Firefox users may still manage individual cookies in the following ways for now:
Load chrome://browser/content/preferences/cookies.xul to display the dialog.
Click on the information button in the Firefox address bar, and navigate to "right arrow" > More Information > View Cookies. Remove the site name to list all set cookies.
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-I to open the Developer Tools and switch to the Storage tab (enable it under settings if it is not there). This lists only the cookies for the active site."
This is also mentioned;
"Mozilla engineers changed this in recent versions of Firefox 60 (currently on the Nightly channel).
If you open the privacy section of about:preferences, you may notice the following:
History lists only three options. The "request cookies from websites" option is no longer listed under History.
A new Cookies and Site Data section is available. It lists the cookie preferences that were listed under History in previous versions.
The "show cookies" link has been removed from the history. It is replaced by a combined management option that includes Site Data and cookies.
firefox 60 cookie management
Cookie settings moved from "use custom settings for history" to a better location in the preferences. Firefox users who did not select the custom option were probably never exposed to the cookie preferences in first place. Also, all options but one that existed previously are still there, some, however, under a different name.
There is no "show cookies" button anymore; Mozilla moved it to Settings under "Cookies and Site Data". A click on the button displays the new management interface. It looks similar to the cookie management interface of previous versions of Firefox but includes storage as well now.Frp"
How? Make things simpler. Go the Apple way. Take as many options as you can away from the user so that the user is left with not too many choices. "Hmm, should I delete all cookies? Well, it may fix the issue, so why not."
It's funny. Even Microshaft Internet Exploder offers an option to remove individual cookies.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?