Mozilla Backtracks On Third-Party Cookie Blocking 173
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."
Mozilla is not free (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mozilla is not free (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Anyone can disable third-party cookies ... but (Score:5, Informative)
That's odd, because I've been running with third-party cookies blocked for years with no obvious problems.
Re:What if they *are* right? (Score:2, Informative)
I have third party cookies disabled and I can login with facebook (and twitter and google) on third party sites just fine.
Re:Time to fork (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:What if they *are* right? (Score:4, Informative)
churn a hell of a lot of money through the world economy
This is an (implied) false dichotomy. It is not as if, without advertising in this way, economic activity would just disappear. The money would simply get spent on other things that people decide that they want. An economy is essential, yes, but no business model/music label/Wall Street bank is required for that.
Re:What if they *are* right? (Score:4, Informative)
Aside from the advertising issue, blocking third party cookies could break behaviour that the user is expecting
Blocking third party cookies is the Safari default. If the site works for Mac and iOS users, it'll work for Firefox users too.
IIRC, fewer than 10% of Safari users have gone and turned on third-party cookies.