Cookies have been used in websites for a very long time now. The initial idea was that cookies helped websites memorize certain things about the user so that when they load the website, they won’t have to start from scratch again. This was meant to be a useful feature, but in recent years, we’ve seen how cookies have been used to track user activity across multiple websites, not just the one that the user is on.For those who might be a bit concerned about their privacy, you might want to strongly consider switching to Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox. This is because in Firefox 86, the company has introduced what they are calling “Total Cookie Protection”. They aren’t blocking cookies by any means, but rather, they are isolating cookies to the website it originated from.
This means that instead of multiple websites dipping into the same cookie jar (you), each website will now be limited to their own cookie jar. This is built on the company’s “Enhanced Tracking Protection” feature where according to Mozilla, “To bring even more comprehensive protection, Total Cookie Protection confines all cookies from each website in a separate cookie jar so that cookies can no longer be used to track you across the web as you browse from site to site.”
This feature will mostly only affect things like ads, where since the cookies they’ll be able to access will be less detailed, you might end up seeing less personalized ads and more generalized ones. This isn’t a bad thing, although we imagine that advertisers might not be too thrilled by this.
Filed in . Read more about Firefox, Mozilla and Privacy. Source: blog.mozilla.org