Newsletter
Mozilla has just announced that it’s rolling out ‘Total Cookie Protection’ for its Internet browser, Firefox. This feature is coming to all Firefox users, worldwide, and it will be enabled by default on both Windows and Mac.
Firefox is getting ‘Total Cookie Protection’ to boost your privacy while browsing
Massive amounts of personal information are live online, and that’s what Firefox will try to fight with this feature. Such data leaks online thanks to cookies that track our behavior across sites and build sophisticated profiles of who we are.
In order to fight that, Firefox announced this feature that “confines cookies to the site where they were created, preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site”.
This feature does give Firefox the upper hand over Chrome and Edge, at least when privacy protection is considered. Mozilla says that “Microsoft’s implementation of tracking protection for users is no more than privacy theater as it doesn’t protect users from the biggest trackers on the web”.
On the flip side, this is what the company had to say about Chrome: “Google is stuck in its Privacy Sandbox quagmire and has bumped its third-party cookie depreciation back twice already)”.
Total Cookie Protection basically isolates your data
What is ‘Total Cookie Protection’ exactly, how does it work? Well, the company says that it creates a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. “Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites”.
No other websites can search into the cookie jars that don’t belong to them. That basically protects your information, as other websites don’t have access to it. This won’t affect your browsing experience, says Mozilla.
Mozilla says that this release comes as a result of “experimentation and feature testing”. The company first tested in ETP Strict Mode and Private Browsing windows, and then in Firefox Focus.