Mozilla has started rolling out Firefox's Total Cookie Protection to all users by default as part of its plans to offer a more private browsing experience on the web. The feature was initially announced last year when it was rolled out as an opt-in option, enabling privacy-conscious users to enable it manually if they wanted. However, it was not turned on by default, which meant that most mainstream users didn't benefit from it. That, however, has now changed. With the initial testing phase now over and done with, Mozilla believes that the time is right for the feature to be available to everyone.
Developed and marketed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is available on many different platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and more. Often described as the best browser for privacy, it has often taken the lead in rolling out privacy-oriented features to users. Thanks to its credentials as the world's leading free and open-source (FOSS) web browser, Firefox is also bundled as the default browsing app in many Linux distros. It also underpins other privacy-focused browsers, such as the TOR Browser.
In an official blog post on Tuesday, Mozilla said that Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection feature yet, and enables users to surf freely without worrying about tracking companies using cookies to track their browsing habits. Available on both Windows and Mac, the new feature "builds a fence around cookies" to limit them to the current site, thereby preventing cross-site tracking. Mozilla further claims that the new feature will offer the right balance between stopping third-party trackers and letting essential cookies do their job uninhibited.
Firefox's Latest Privacy Feature
For those wondering how the feature works, it creates a separate 'cookie jar' for each website the user visits, thereby stopping trackers from linking the user's behavior across multiple sites. Whenever a site stores a cookie in the browser, that cookie is restricted to a single jar meant for that website only. No other site is allowed to access that jar, and nor is that particular site allowed to access other cookie jars from other sites. This eventually reduces the total amount of information these websites have on a user and cuts out the hyper-personalized ads people often see across the web.
It is worth noting here that the Total Cookie Prevention feature is unique to Firefox and is unavailable in other popular browsers, such as Chrome and Edge. The only other browser that offers a somewhat similar feature to prevent cross-site tracking is Apple's Safari. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft and Google will now follow Mozilla's lead and introduce a similar feature to their respective browsers. Or if they will adopt a wait-and-watch policy to see if it has any perceptible change in user preferences in favor of Firefox before taking a step in that direction.
Source: Mozilla