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Firefox 91 introduces enhanced cookie clearing

wackget 5y ago
How is this any different from disabling third-party cookies and clearing website cookies manually?
spuz 5y ago
This version of Firefox is also the first major piece of software to be translated into Scots - a language spoken / understood by 1.3m people in Scotland. My previous company worked on the translation and they told me they had fun trying to come up with suitable equivalents for technical words such as "minimise" and "maximise". https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/08/10/firefox-91-introduces-enhanced-cookie-clearing/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/08/10/firefox-91-intr... https://www.thenational.scot/news/19494171.major-web-browser-first-available-scots-language/ https://www.thenational.scot/news/19494171.major-web-browser...
- jefftk 5y ago
  Did you mean to post this on the general Firefox 91 thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128305
  - spuz 5y ago
    I would have if I had seen it!
- dmurray 5y ago
  Scots is a dialect of English. So finding idiomatic Scots expressions for technical terms, instead of importing them verbatim, really is about "having fun" rather than achieving any extra clarity in communication.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > Scots is a dialect of English Beware fighting words > Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300) > As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.
  - daleharvey 5y ago
    Describing Scots as a dialect of English is really about a political affiliation than any interest in linguistics, Plenty of people regard Scots as a distinct language. (Scottish Firefox developer)
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Neat!
    - dmurray 5y ago
      I don't have any affiliation with England, or the US, and would also consider "English is a dialect of Scots". (More than one person in Galicia described the Portuguese language to me in the analogous way...). Still, I think it's silly to go all kayfabe here and treat the languages as completely distinct. I have similar thoughts on Slovenian and Slovakian and Flemish.
      - Fomorian 5y ago
        People that have a vested interest in the suppression of the indigenous Goidelic language of Scotland - on both sides of the England-Scotland border - will always insist upon the full-fledged distinctive language status of Scottish English.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  Hopefully not by the same guy who ran the scots version of wikipedia.
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  I hope they had a bit less fun than the American teenager that edited most of the Scottish Wikipedia pages with nonsense Scottish! https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-language-american-teenager.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-languag...
  - amelius 5y ago
    > Despite his well-meaning enthusiasm, AG admitted to making many mistakes. For example, AG used the Scots Online Dictionary to look up specific words in Scots. But the content that AG added to Wikipedia was not a true translation because he did not fully understand Scots grammar and syntax. Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Lived in Scotland for 20 years, really doubt 1.3m people even know what Scots is let alone speak it.
  - lucideer 5y ago
    It's a self-reported stat (census answers), so that many of people at the very least believe they know what Scots is (as they responded that they do speak it). I did find it striking that the same stat for Gaelic was just over 50k in contrast: while I know the level of Gaelic spoken in Scotland is extremely low, it's at least a better known language internationally than Scots is, so I would've expected it to be the more spoken of the two.
  - spuz 5y ago
    Oops, sorry I meant to double check that and forgot. It's apparently 1.9m people.
    - sdflhasjd 5y ago
      To be fair, that number is self-reported and combines "speak, read, write or understand Scots". I'm not Scottish myself, but even I could claim to somewhat understand Scots. I wouldn't say so on a census, but I'm sure there are plenty that would. Especially when there's some national pride at stake.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Most people know a little bit. That's the thing with Scots, it's highly miscible with English so it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
    - Fomorian 5y ago
      Because it's basically a dialect OF English. In fact, literally the only reason it's called "Scots" and not "Inglis", as it originally was, is as the Lowlander Scots gradually developed a sense of national identity separate from the English, they decided that they wanted a national label of their own. But of course, they still didn't want to share a national label or identity with the hated native Celtic-speaking population. And so "Inglis" became "Scots", while "Scottis" - the native Goidelic language - became "Erse", or Irish. The whole thing is insidious.
- deanclatworthy 5y ago
  I’m English, and lived in England for 23 years. I have never ever heard of Scots before.
  - lentil 5y ago
    As a Scot, I find that a bit sad. We’re really not that far away! Does that also mean you never learned about Rabbie Burns in school?
    - deanclatworthy 5y ago
      I know his name and who he is. I vaguely recall some of his poems being recited at school. I like to think I'm a man of the world. I watch a lot of Scottish TV (Burnistoun etc.), have done the NC500 and have plenty of Scottish friends. Of course there is dialect there, but I didn't realise this was a "thing".
      - macfaran 5y ago
        There's a whole cannon of literature written in it (Dunbar, Ferguson, Ramsay, MacDairmid, Henryson, Kelman, Leonard, Souter etc.) as well as a bit of a discussion whether the literature reflected or embellished Scots (Burns and MacDairmid both made up words for example). When people think of Scots they usually think of the Glaswegian dialect of English you commonly hear on the TV. But there's still a whole set of words in common use today around Scotland. You hear it more in rural areas and less in the central belt.
  - jahnu 5y ago
    That's really a pity. In England there is a terrible lack of knowledge of the other parts of the Union. It's because of decisions like the not quite full on Scots but truly brilliant Limmy's Show only being shown on BBC Scotland.
- ladon86 5y ago
  Don’t leave us hanging, what words did they come up with?
  - spuz 5y ago
    'mak muckle' and 'mak tottie'
- howolduis 5y ago
  this version o' firefox is an' a' th' foremaist major piece o' software tae be translated intae scots - a leid spoken / understaun by 1.3m fowk in bonnie scotland. Mah afore company worked oan th' translation 'n' thay tellt me thay hud fin trying tae come up wi' suitable equivalents fur tekky wurds sic as 'minimise' 'n' 'maximise'.
  - walteweiss 5y ago
    Now I want to study this wonderful language! Any books I can (try to) read in Scots? Serious question! :)
    - donbrae 5y ago
      Not a book but I run a blog written in Scots: https://makforrit.scot https://makforrit.scot.
    - yorwba 5y ago
      How about some 19th-century songs? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Scottish_Song https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Scottish_Song
    - eigart 5y ago
      Not a book, but https://twitter.com/Lenniesaurus?s=20 https://twitter.com/Lenniesaurus?s=20 does a fun “scots word of the day” series!
    - mgkimsal 5y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeWbC7XtO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeWbC7XtO0 See how much of that series you can get through. :)
    - JohnicBoom 5y ago
      I've heard the Scots version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is really well done, and is fun to read even as an American. That said, I have no experience at all with Scots, so my opinion should have very little weight!
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  So does "enhanced cookie clearing" become "pure biscuit clearin'"?
  - ricardo81 5y ago
    chuck aw them biscuity hings right oot.
- ricardo81 5y ago
  As a Southern Scot I'm familiar with muckle, many a mickle makes a muckle. I believe the CSS equivalent of a pixel in browser rendering here is a "baw hair".
- dheera 5y ago
  I suppose cookies become biscuits?
beermonster 5y ago
Wonder if this means cookie-autodelete[1] is now redundant? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
- jefftk 5y ago
  Cookie AutoDelete deletes cookies when you close the tab, right? That's pretty different from this feature, where cookies are only deleted when you ask the browser to delete them.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    When a tab closes, any cookies not being used are automatically deleted. You can whitelist the ones you trust and it has support for Container Tabs.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  No but it may be complement the extension. You may ask the question at https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/discussions https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/discu...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pomian 5y ago
Great. Finally. I always wondered why some sites reopen on data relevant to a past date, (weather web site for example), even though all history, cookies, site data, etc, has been set to clear upon shut down. Which always makes you wonder what else is stored.
jefftk 5y ago
Total Cookie Protection, built into Firefox, makes sure that facebook.com can’t use cookies to track you across websites. It does this by partitioning data storage into one cookie jar per website, rather than using one big jar for all of facebook.com’s storage. With Enhanced Cookie Clearing, if you clear site data for comfypants.com, the entire cookie jar is emptied, including any data facebook.com set while embedded in comfypants.com. This seems exactly right: now that we have partitioned cookies, cookie clearing should clear cookies for the whole partition.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Should also make it easier to defeat some paywalls by clearing cookies just for that site.
- faichai 5y ago
  It’s insane that this hasn’t been the default all along across all browsers. Just shows how Google et al, strive to safeguard and profit from the status quo, at the expense of every internet user.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    > It’s insane that this hasn’t been the default all along across all browsers Historically cookies weren't partitioned by site. So if you went to clear the cookies for https://publisher.example https://publisher.example, then the browser wouldn't know whether to also clear cookies for https://other.example https://other.example. (Cookies are still not partitioned by default in Firefox; it requires turning on Total Cookie Protection)
  - sp332 5y ago
    This is two huge changes away from how every browser historically stored and cleared cookies, including old Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari, everybody.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    It's ridiculous to suggest that this was somehow all nefariously intended by Google et al. How do you then explain that's what Firefox has done all the way up until now? No -- it's just how cookies were meant to work from the start, the most obvious implementation before the privacy/security/tracking implications got worked out, which has taken many years. And Google's working to make similar improvements to Chrome: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-path-towards.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-... So not "insane" at all. To the contrary, it was entirely reasonable at the beginning, and now we see browsers reasonably addressing the problems that have arisen.
pixxel 5y ago
I’m such a cynical bastard. My mind says, what took so long to tackle cookies, FLoC?
- michaelt 5y ago
  Firefox doesn't have enough market share/power to dictate terms to website owners; if they just disabled third-party cookies, websites that broke would just tell users to switch to Chrome. Chrome isn't going to tackle tracking/fingerprinting for obvious reasons.
DavideNL 5y ago
I hate how Safari on iPad does not have proper Cookie handling… The only solution is to permanently use Safari in “private mode”, but it has some limitations (you cannot remember your browsing history, and you can’t set a default Font size for example.) Firefox on iOS can do this, but you can’t set a Font size at all. So many websites (like Hacker News) are nearly impossible to read on an iPad.
- nagyf 5y ago
  Why does HN have such a bad font size? I always have to set it to 120% otherwise it's so small I can't even read it on my big ultrawide monitor. This is the only website which I have to scale up on every computer...
  - gruez 5y ago
    Do you have eyesight issues and/or a high dpi display? I'm using a ~105 ppi display and it works fine with regular font size.
    - jlarocco 5y ago
      I do have a high DPI display, and HN is ridiculously tiny without manually overriding, because it's setting text size in pixels instead of points, for no good reason. It doesn't make any sense. View source shows: line-height:12pt; height:10px; Why use device independent units for line-height, but not the text itself?
      - gruez 5y ago
        >setting text size in pixels instead of points "px" in css doesn't correspond to literal pixels on the display. >By definition, this is the physical size of a single pixel at a pixel density of 96 DPI, located an arm's length away from the viewer's eyes. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_pixel https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_pixel
        5y ago
oakfr 5y ago
Nice feature, although I wish firefox could fix the other side of the cookie nightmare: auto-fill the (now humongous) forms we need to fill in for our cookie settings, for each website. I feel like I am applying for a mortgage a few times a day now.
- llimos 5y ago
  I think by law they have to make it as easy to opt out as to opt in. So for almost all the websites I see, clicking 'More options' defaults to everything off. I now do 'More options' > 'Save' on autopilot (and if one or two bad 'uns slip through the net, so be it - life's too short).
  - kfoley 5y ago
    The only problem is that there is often an option to allow cookies to "store site preferences" or something along those lines. My experience is this also includes your cookie preferences which means if you don't enable that single option, you'll have to go through the steps to disable cookies pretty much every time you visit.
  - llimos 5y ago
    The real scandal is when 'More options' takes 20 seconds to load - clearly deliberate but with just enough plausible deniability.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    And NOYB has started pushing for more enforcement, so it's likely sites will become more compliant. It turns out that those third party "consent form in a box" solutions tend to have settings to let the website operators choose how user-hostile the popup is supposed to be. It's a shame the DPAs are all understaffed, incompetent, unwilling, or willfully looking away (e.g. in the case of Ireland) instead of taking expensive enforcement action against companies that violate it. A few expensive examples and every site would have a top-level, equally visible "reject all" button, and after a while, sites would realize that with 90% of people choosing that, they might as well skip that popup and assume rejection. Those popups aren't mandatory at all, sites can simply respect your privacy by default.
jansan 5y ago
Firefox does not start for me anymore. Gives a blank error message and the content area is blank. That's finally it, I guess.
drdebug 5y ago
Great, this is really going in the right direction! So far I had been using different firefox startup profiles for different activities to emulate this behaviour (works even for extensions).
llimos 5y ago
The site they choose to demo forgetting about is HN?!
- taftster 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm guessing this was a deliberate joke for us here. The author knew this would be closely read and critiqued by the folks here. I'm sure s/he was waiting for exactly your comment on the HN thread.
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    Most importantly, /. was not included as a visited site.
bennysomething 5y ago
Can anyone tell me why since past version 68 of Firefox on Android nearly all my add-ons don't work. Is there an alternative for "I don't care about cookies" . Add-ons working on mobile in Firefox was the main reason I'm still a Firefox user. They have pretty much killed that by breaking compatibility.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Can anyone tell me why since past version 68 of Firefox on Android nearly all my add-ons don't work Because they switched rendering engines or something. Now addons are restricted to a small subset that they've validated. You can use a custom addon collection to install untested addons (see: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...) to get around this, but there's no guarantee that the addons will work.
  - noisem4ker 5y ago
    I can confirm the add-on I Don't Care About Cookies works just fine if installed that way. It's just inconvenient. I wonder what stops the list of approved add-ons from growing.
    - bennysomething 5y ago
      I might try this thanks. Looks really involved though!
      - mfo4321 5y ago
        Hope you didn't upgrade past 90: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647
- tomrod 5y ago
  It also broke font sizing/rendering on sites like reddit. I loved Firefox mobile and this did me dirty. One of the big draws was adblock, and on top of needing text and extensions they changed the UI to be antiproductive. Their playstore ratings took a massive nose dive after that release. Shame. They are the only real browser competition to Chrome.
tofflos 5y ago
> Now, if you click on Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and Site Data > Manage Data, Firefox no longer shows individual domains that store data. Instead, Firefox lists a cookie jar for each website you have visited. How is data from previous versions of Firefox handled? Will data from ad networks be listed as a "website you have visited", made unavailable for the embedding site's cookie jar, and re-fetched upon the next visit?
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  This is a good question. Its not an answer, but I think I'll clear everything upon installing this update.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BuckRogers 5y ago
Typing this from Firefox, been typing from Firefox since 2002. Never moved to Chrome. That's probably a small group of people for sure, and I'm actually happy with this update, and the changes Mozilla has been making. I do think, completely against the grain of most Firefox fans, that they should've moved to Chromium ages ago. That would solve the reason people are actually leaving.. issues with Google properties. I have my mother in-law on Edge because there's less issues when she jumps on her karate class using Google Meets. There should be someone out there to battle Blink, I suppose, but without user share at all, how do you hold any weight anyway? It really doesn't make sense, the argument people make. It's usershare first, then you have weight to put towards web standards. And I'm afraid Mozilla doesn't have the resources and willpower to fight that battle anyway. If I'm calling shots with Firefox I'm moving to Chromium immediately and then focusing on UI and privacy features. It's probably too late to make that change though. I just read Firefox lost 50 million monthly users in the last two years. It's a little sad, there is room in the market for a 3rd party, power user's browser but it's obvious as can be that whatever browser that will be- it will be on Chromium and it won't be Firefox.
newscracker 5y ago
This would be even more better with a “Forget this site” button that could be added to the toolbar (if the user wishes to). Clicking on it would clear everything for the site and close the tab. The nested menus to access it aren’t very convenient. I do use CookieAutoDelete to handle this for closed tabs.
- teddyfrozevelt 5y ago
  You can mostly do this through the lock icon with the "Clear cookies and site data" button.
  - jaytaylor 5y ago
    Never knew about this functionality, thanks for sharing! It even appears to exist and work in Chrome.
  - SimeVidas 5y ago
    Is “Clear cookies and site data” the same as “Forget about this site”? Firefox could use a simpler UI.
- sovnade 5y ago
  Ooh I like this idea. Going to look into CookiesAutoDelete. Thank you!
- potamic 5y ago
  I tried CookieAutoDelete but it seems to be whitelist based only? How do I instead say block only these domains?
  - throwaway64643 5y ago
    No, there are two types of rule in Cookie AutoDelete (CAD) that you have to read through their documentation to understand their function: Greylist and Whitelist. You have assign these domains to Greylist (whose filter setting has to be pre-configured first, namely you decide what to be kept/removed in greylist rule). I use in combination with Firefox containers feature Enable Automatic Cleaning of CAD, which deletes all cookies (as well domain related contents) except those in whitelist. That has saved me a lot of time in manual greylisting.
_trampeltier 5y ago
I wish they would build a desktop version of Firefix Focus (Android). One big big button and everything is throwed away.
- tsjq 5y ago
  Ctrl+Shift+Delete does that ?
nimbius 5y ago
>cookie handling that lets you fully erase your browser history for any website. how about allowing me to whitelist and blacklist cookies from a button? why did that feature have to disappear in the first place? instead I now have a menu in about:preferences#privacy that requires a full URL to be entered, added with a button, then confirmed with "save" in what appears to be an effort to get me to just accept cookies. whats worse is if i switch between allow cookies, and then back to custom, my selection to block all cookies isnt honored at all. instead i get put back into 'block third party cookies.' finally theres the misery of including blocked sites in the 'preferences' you can delete as part of your browser history, which seems like an effort to further reduce my predictable and consistent ability to block cookies altogether.
nashashmi 5y ago
Damn it Firefox. Your cookie protection system is too damn interrupting and does not provide good enough protection. I don’t want a security “profile” because I don’t fit in to whatever few boxes you have setup. Or maybe I just don’t trust what you do behind that security profile setup. I want my own granular cookie tracking. Steal it from chrome if you have to. It is the best thing since sliced bread. I want a list of every cookie I have got. Just like IE used to do. Just chrome does today. I want to set in the smallest detail which cookies are allowed, which are blocked, and which only last until I close session. I have umatrix and ublock with only my personal filter list. It is not good enough. I want something much like chrome.
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  "Cookie Autodelete" plugin might be what you want, then. Sadly I don't know what "like chrome" means, so don't know if the plugin's functionality is more-or-less equivalent, since I never use Chrome.
- davzie 5y ago
  Calm down Veruca Salt
code_duck 5y ago
It sure takes a lot of work from the rest of the community to reduce google and facebook's ability to keep us under constant surveillance. My personal relationship with facebook feels fully abusive at this point.
djhworld 5y ago
I'm a heavy user of the "firefox containers" feature, where I try to isolate the social media sites to their own containers (twitter, facebook etc) and also one for reddit. I've also got one for google products as well as I try to use DDG most of the time. Anyway I wish FF had a feature that broke down the cookies PER container, so I could purge any ones that might have snuck in due to a lapse in my judgement, e.g. if I see facebook cookies in my "twitter" container then I'd like to purge them for that particular container only. FF only allows you to do a global purge. EDIT: I can see this bug was raised 3 years ago which suggests it _used_ to be a feature that got removed, but sounds like it was never put back in/low priority/WONTFIX. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1480175 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1480175
- glandium 5y ago
  Not the clearest UI, but https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-quick-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-quick-... does what you want.
viktorcode 5y ago
Is it any different from "manage website data" in Safari? I use it to make sites forget about me.
devwastaken 5y ago
The benefit of this also fixes bugs. Weather.com bugged on me because it uses supercookies, it would send me to the wrong link when I clicked in the search bar for my saved location. Had to manually go through and delete all the copies of the same cookies in local storage and other places they put it. The next step is for Firefox to finally adopt torbrowser, and natively support not allowing fingerprinting by default.
- autoexec 5y ago
  Offtopic, but since you brought it up and outed yourself as a user, what's the appeal of weather.com vs weather.gov? The .com collects and sells your data with 3rd parties and I'm guessing they get much of their data from the national weather service anyway. Is there some service/feature that draws you to them?
idoubtit 5y ago
If you disallow third party cookies, then there is no use for this per website cookie jar. I've browsed the web like this for decades (since Opera 9, IIRC), and I had problems with at most 5 websites. YMMV, of course. In my opinion, the simplest way to deal with cookies is to disallow third party, and to keep a white list of authorized websites. Cookies outside this white list should be deleted manually or automatically after a few hours. Extensions for this probably exist, but I've had bad experiences with extensions breaking or becoming intrusive, so I made my own where I hard coded the domains that I want to keep.
- lazyweb 5y ago
  I'm using FF almost exactly the same way as you describe, and have found the "Forget Me Not" addon to be great. Not allowing 3rd party cookies at all via browser settings, then the addon deletes all cookies for a specific site after closing the tab. Having a whitelist with 5-6 sites where I keep cookies forever.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... is great
- amelius 5y ago
  But the technique does not scale. I.e., if more people start using this, then at some point companies may start blocking people.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    Not if this becomes the default in browsers with meaningful market share. Also, blocking people who use privacy settings can be legally iffy. Many sites are already on thin ice, telling people to use their browser settings if they don't want tracking cookies. Forcing tracking like that sounds like a recipe to receive an expensive lesson in GDPR.
    - 5y ago
mousepilot 5y ago
Firefox 90+ doesn't even run for me. Bog standard ubuntu 20.04. These guys have really lost their mojo. I have to stick with the 7x lts versions.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> lets you fully erase your browser history for any website I just want a button to whitelist a domain and an option to automatically clear 100% of everything outside the whitelisted domains on every restart. And always clean the cache, perhaps even for whitelisted domains unless the system is on a metered/slow connection. Also, every website should always be opened in a separate "container" so cross-site tracking won't work. If Chrome did that today this would trigger a cascade of consequences. If Firefox did that today it would just improve Firefox popularity and cause no problems.
- adwf 5y ago
  As a number of people above mentioned, Cookie AutoDelete extension for FF does exactly this. Sites start out default clearing all cookies the moment you clear the tab. Greylisting clears them when you close the browser. Whitelist retains all cookies. Multi-account Container and Temporary Container extensions take care of your per-tab container needs.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Although I use Cookie AutoDelete and open GMail (which I didn't whitelist) in a separate container, GMail still remembers me somehow. I have to manually go and clear all the saved data in the Firefox settings to actually reset everything.
    - bostonvaulter2 5y ago
      It sounds like you're hitting a Firefox bug affecting Cookie AutoDelete. Something about the recent changes to cookies has prevented extensions from clearing partitioned cookies.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
There is a simple way to do cookie clearing outside the browser. Insert the header Clear-Site-Data^1 into the HTTP response via local proxy^2: 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Clear-Site-Data https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cl... 2. http-response add-header Clear-Site-Data "*"
II2II 5y ago
An observation from their animated demonstration: the recent history includes sites like Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter yet the site they choose to forget about is Hacker News. It was worth a chuckle. As a heavy user of Multi-account Containers, I will be interested to see how this feature interacts with it. I use containers to maintain multiple profiles on websites and loosing all the data for those websites after clearing cookies can be frustrating.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
I'd love to see a toggle button on the URL bar for every website. By default it's off, and it means that cookies as deleted as soon as I close the last tab for that website. Clicking it whitelists the website and cookies are retained until I turn it off again. This is kind of like the approach we had in the nineties. You used to get a prompt for each website, asking if you wanted to allow cookies or not. This is like a second iteration on that.
- bostonvaulter2 5y ago
  This is pretty much exactly what Cookie AutoDelete does. I love it. Although there's a Firefox bug currently that's preventing many cookies from being deleted which has been annoying, but should hopefully be resolved soon.
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
And this is also the release where they drop the support for disabling "Proton" UI and therefore Firefox will no longer respect my system color scheme, and I will lose even more vertical space. Thanks...
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Look at this shit! [1] Who designed this garbage?! [1] https://hypertele.fi/temp/firefox-ui.png https://hypertele.fi/temp/firefox-ui.png
- climb_stealth 5y ago
  Noooooooooooooo. I just updated and ran into this as well. It is still possible to enable the compact mode from about:config but it looks like the new tab style can't be easily changed anymore. Oh well, see if it still hurts in a few days.
mrgill 5y ago
Firefox is amazing.

How is this any different from disabling third-party cookies and clearing website cookies manually?

spuz 5y ago

This version of Firefox is also the first major piece of software to be translated into Scots - a language spoken / understood by 1.3m people in Scotland. My previous company worked on the translation and they told me they had fun trying to come up with suitable equivalents for technical words such as "minimise" and "maximise". https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/08/10/firefox-91-introduces-enhanced-cookie-clearing/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/08/10/firefox-91-intr... https://www.thenational.scot/news/19494171.major-web-browser-first-available-scots-language/ https://www.thenational.scot/news/19494171.major-web-browser...

jefftk 5y ago
Did you mean to post this on the general Firefox 91 thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128305
- spuz 5y ago
  I would have if I had seen it!
dmurray 5y ago
Scots is a dialect of English. So finding idiomatic Scots expressions for technical terms, instead of importing them verbatim, really is about "having fun" rather than achieving any extra clarity in communication.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > Scots is a dialect of English Beware fighting words > Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300) > As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.
- daleharvey 5y ago
  Describing Scots as a dialect of English is really about a political affiliation than any interest in linguistics, Plenty of people regard Scots as a distinct language. (Scottish Firefox developer)
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Neat!
  - dmurray 5y ago
    I don't have any affiliation with England, or the US, and would also consider "English is a dialect of Scots". (More than one person in Galicia described the Portuguese language to me in the analogous way...). Still, I think it's silly to go all kayfabe here and treat the languages as completely distinct. I have similar thoughts on Slovenian and Slovakian and Flemish.
    - Fomorian 5y ago
      People that have a vested interest in the suppression of the indigenous Goidelic language of Scotland - on both sides of the England-Scotland border - will always insist upon the full-fledged distinctive language status of Scottish English.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
Hopefully not by the same guy who ran the scots version of wikipedia.
clydethefrog 5y ago
I hope they had a bit less fun than the American teenager that edited most of the Scottish Wikipedia pages with nonsense Scottish! https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-language-american-teenager.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-languag...
- amelius 5y ago
  > Despite his well-meaning enthusiasm, AG admitted to making many mistakes. For example, AG used the Scots Online Dictionary to look up specific words in Scots. But the content that AG added to Wikipedia was not a true translation because he did not fully understand Scots grammar and syntax. Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bennysomething 5y ago
Lived in Scotland for 20 years, really doubt 1.3m people even know what Scots is let alone speak it.
- lucideer 5y ago
  It's a self-reported stat (census answers), so that many of people at the very least believe they know what Scots is (as they responded that they do speak it). I did find it striking that the same stat for Gaelic was just over 50k in contrast: while I know the level of Gaelic spoken in Scotland is extremely low, it's at least a better known language internationally than Scots is, so I would've expected it to be the more spoken of the two.
- spuz 5y ago
  Oops, sorry I meant to double check that and forgot. It's apparently 1.9m people.
  - sdflhasjd 5y ago
    To be fair, that number is self-reported and combines "speak, read, write or understand Scots". I'm not Scottish myself, but even I could claim to somewhat understand Scots. I wouldn't say so on a census, but I'm sure there are plenty that would. Especially when there's some national pride at stake.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Most people know a little bit. That's the thing with Scots, it's highly miscible with English so it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
  - Fomorian 5y ago
    Because it's basically a dialect OF English. In fact, literally the only reason it's called "Scots" and not "Inglis", as it originally was, is as the Lowlander Scots gradually developed a sense of national identity separate from the English, they decided that they wanted a national label of their own. But of course, they still didn't want to share a national label or identity with the hated native Celtic-speaking population. And so "Inglis" became "Scots", while "Scottis" - the native Goidelic language - became "Erse", or Irish. The whole thing is insidious.
deanclatworthy 5y ago
I’m English, and lived in England for 23 years. I have never ever heard of Scots before.
- lentil 5y ago
  As a Scot, I find that a bit sad. We’re really not that far away! Does that also mean you never learned about Rabbie Burns in school?
  - deanclatworthy 5y ago
    I know his name and who he is. I vaguely recall some of his poems being recited at school. I like to think I'm a man of the world. I watch a lot of Scottish TV (Burnistoun etc.), have done the NC500 and have plenty of Scottish friends. Of course there is dialect there, but I didn't realise this was a "thing".
    - macfaran 5y ago
      There's a whole cannon of literature written in it (Dunbar, Ferguson, Ramsay, MacDairmid, Henryson, Kelman, Leonard, Souter etc.) as well as a bit of a discussion whether the literature reflected or embellished Scots (Burns and MacDairmid both made up words for example). When people think of Scots they usually think of the Glaswegian dialect of English you commonly hear on the TV. But there's still a whole set of words in common use today around Scotland. You hear it more in rural areas and less in the central belt.
- jahnu 5y ago
  That's really a pity. In England there is a terrible lack of knowledge of the other parts of the Union. It's because of decisions like the not quite full on Scots but truly brilliant Limmy's Show only being shown on BBC Scotland.
ladon86 5y ago
Don’t leave us hanging, what words did they come up with?
- spuz 5y ago
  'mak muckle' and 'mak tottie'
howolduis 5y ago
this version o' firefox is an' a' th' foremaist major piece o' software tae be translated intae scots - a leid spoken / understaun by 1.3m fowk in bonnie scotland. Mah afore company worked oan th' translation 'n' thay tellt me thay hud fin trying tae come up wi' suitable equivalents fur tekky wurds sic as 'minimise' 'n' 'maximise'.
- walteweiss 5y ago
  Now I want to study this wonderful language! Any books I can (try to) read in Scots? Serious question! :)
  - donbrae 5y ago
    Not a book but I run a blog written in Scots: https://makforrit.scot https://makforrit.scot.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    How about some 19th-century songs? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Scottish_Song https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Scottish_Song
  - eigart 5y ago
    Not a book, but https://twitter.com/Lenniesaurus?s=20 https://twitter.com/Lenniesaurus?s=20 does a fun “scots word of the day” series!
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeWbC7XtO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeWbC7XtO0 See how much of that series you can get through. :)
  - JohnicBoom 5y ago
    I've heard the Scots version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is really well done, and is fun to read even as an American. That said, I have no experience at all with Scots, so my opinion should have very little weight!
dkdbejwi383 5y ago
So does "enhanced cookie clearing" become "pure biscuit clearin'"?
- ricardo81 5y ago
  chuck aw them biscuity hings right oot.
ricardo81 5y ago
As a Southern Scot I'm familiar with muckle, many a mickle makes a muckle. I believe the CSS equivalent of a pixel in browser rendering here is a "baw hair".
dheera 5y ago
I suppose cookies become biscuits?

beermonster 5y ago

Wonder if this means cookie-autodelete[1] is now redundant? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

jefftk 5y ago
Cookie AutoDelete deletes cookies when you close the tab, right? That's pretty different from this feature, where cookies are only deleted when you ask the browser to delete them.
- beermonster 5y ago
  When a tab closes, any cookies not being used are automatically deleted. You can whitelist the ones you trust and it has support for Container Tabs.
rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
No but it may be complement the extension. You may ask the question at https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/discussions https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/discu...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pomian 5y ago

Great. Finally. I always wondered why some sites reopen on data relevant to a past date, (weather web site for example), even though all history, cookies, site data, etc, has been set to clear upon shut down. Which always makes you wonder what else is stored.

jefftk 5y ago

Total Cookie Protection, built into Firefox, makes sure that facebook.com can’t use cookies to track you across websites. It does this by partitioning data storage into one cookie jar per website, rather than using one big jar for all of facebook.com’s storage. With Enhanced Cookie Clearing, if you clear site data for comfypants.com, the entire cookie jar is emptied, including any data facebook.com set while embedded in comfypants.com. This seems exactly right: now that we have partitioned cookies, cookie clearing should clear cookies for the whole partition.

jrochkind1 5y ago
Should also make it easier to defeat some paywalls by clearing cookies just for that site.
faichai 5y ago
It’s insane that this hasn’t been the default all along across all browsers. Just shows how Google et al, strive to safeguard and profit from the status quo, at the expense of every internet user.
- jefftk 5y ago
  > It’s insane that this hasn’t been the default all along across all browsers Historically cookies weren't partitioned by site. So if you went to clear the cookies for https://publisher.example https://publisher.example, then the browser wouldn't know whether to also clear cookies for https://other.example https://other.example. (Cookies are still not partitioned by default in Firefox; it requires turning on Total Cookie Protection)
- sp332 5y ago
  This is two huge changes away from how every browser historically stored and cleared cookies, including old Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari, everybody.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  It's ridiculous to suggest that this was somehow all nefariously intended by Google et al. How do you then explain that's what Firefox has done all the way up until now? No -- it's just how cookies were meant to work from the start, the most obvious implementation before the privacy/security/tracking implications got worked out, which has taken many years. And Google's working to make similar improvements to Chrome: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-path-towards.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-... So not "insane" at all. To the contrary, it was entirely reasonable at the beginning, and now we see browsers reasonably addressing the problems that have arisen.

pixxel 5y ago

I’m such a cynical bastard. My mind says, what took so long to tackle cookies, FLoC?

michaelt 5y ago
Firefox doesn't have enough market share/power to dictate terms to website owners; if they just disabled third-party cookies, websites that broke would just tell users to switch to Chrome. Chrome isn't going to tackle tracking/fingerprinting for obvious reasons.

DavideNL 5y ago

I hate how Safari on iPad does not have proper Cookie handling… The only solution is to permanently use Safari in “private mode”, but it has some limitations (you cannot remember your browsing history, and you can’t set a default Font size for example.) Firefox on iOS can do this, but you can’t set a Font size at all. So many websites (like Hacker News) are nearly impossible to read on an iPad.

nagyf 5y ago
Why does HN have such a bad font size? I always have to set it to 120% otherwise it's so small I can't even read it on my big ultrawide monitor. This is the only website which I have to scale up on every computer...
- gruez 5y ago
  Do you have eyesight issues and/or a high dpi display? I'm using a ~105 ppi display and it works fine with regular font size.
  - jlarocco 5y ago
    I do have a high DPI display, and HN is ridiculously tiny without manually overriding, because it's setting text size in pixels instead of points, for no good reason. It doesn't make any sense. View source shows: line-height:12pt; height:10px; Why use device independent units for line-height, but not the text itself?
    - gruez 5y ago
      >setting text size in pixels instead of points "px" in css doesn't correspond to literal pixels on the display. >By definition, this is the physical size of a single pixel at a pixel density of 96 DPI, located an arm's length away from the viewer's eyes. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_pixel https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_pixel
      - 5y ago

oakfr 5y ago

Nice feature, although I wish firefox could fix the other side of the cookie nightmare: auto-fill the (now humongous) forms we need to fill in for our cookie settings, for each website. I feel like I am applying for a mortgage a few times a day now.

llimos 5y ago
I think by law they have to make it as easy to opt out as to opt in. So for almost all the websites I see, clicking 'More options' defaults to everything off. I now do 'More options' > 'Save' on autopilot (and if one or two bad 'uns slip through the net, so be it - life's too short).
- kfoley 5y ago
  The only problem is that there is often an option to allow cookies to "store site preferences" or something along those lines. My experience is this also includes your cookie preferences which means if you don't enable that single option, you'll have to go through the steps to disable cookies pretty much every time you visit.
- llimos 5y ago
  The real scandal is when 'More options' takes 20 seconds to load - clearly deliberate but with just enough plausible deniability.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  And NOYB has started pushing for more enforcement, so it's likely sites will become more compliant. It turns out that those third party "consent form in a box" solutions tend to have settings to let the website operators choose how user-hostile the popup is supposed to be. It's a shame the DPAs are all understaffed, incompetent, unwilling, or willfully looking away (e.g. in the case of Ireland) instead of taking expensive enforcement action against companies that violate it. A few expensive examples and every site would have a top-level, equally visible "reject all" button, and after a while, sites would realize that with 90% of people choosing that, they might as well skip that popup and assume rejection. Those popups aren't mandatory at all, sites can simply respect your privacy by default.

jansan 5y ago

Firefox does not start for me anymore. Gives a blank error message and the content area is blank. That's finally it, I guess.

drdebug 5y ago

Great, this is really going in the right direction! So far I had been using different firefox startup profiles for different activities to emulate this behaviour (works even for extensions).

llimos 5y ago

The site they choose to demo forgetting about is HN?!

taftster 5y ago
Yeah, I'm guessing this was a deliberate joke for us here. The author knew this would be closely read and critiqued by the folks here. I'm sure s/he was waiting for exactly your comment on the HN thread.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  Most importantly, /. was not included as a visited site.

bennysomething 5y ago

Can anyone tell me why since past version 68 of Firefox on Android nearly all my add-ons don't work. Is there an alternative for "I don't care about cookies" . Add-ons working on mobile in Firefox was the main reason I'm still a Firefox user. They have pretty much killed that by breaking compatibility.

gruez 5y ago
>Can anyone tell me why since past version 68 of Firefox on Android nearly all my add-ons don't work Because they switched rendering engines or something. Now addons are restricted to a small subset that they've validated. You can use a custom addon collection to install untested addons (see: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...) to get around this, but there's no guarantee that the addons will work.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  I can confirm the add-on I Don't Care About Cookies works just fine if installed that way. It's just inconvenient. I wonder what stops the list of approved add-ons from growing.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    I might try this thanks. Looks really involved though!
    - mfo4321 5y ago
      Hope you didn't upgrade past 90: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647
tomrod 5y ago
It also broke font sizing/rendering on sites like reddit. I loved Firefox mobile and this did me dirty. One of the big draws was adblock, and on top of needing text and extensions they changed the UI to be antiproductive. Their playstore ratings took a massive nose dive after that release. Shame. They are the only real browser competition to Chrome.

tofflos 5y ago

> Now, if you click on Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and Site Data > Manage Data, Firefox no longer shows individual domains that store data. Instead, Firefox lists a cookie jar for each website you have visited. How is data from previous versions of Firefox handled? Will data from ad networks be listed as a "website you have visited", made unavailable for the embedding site's cookie jar, and re-fetched upon the next visit?

SubiculumCode 5y ago
This is a good question. Its not an answer, but I think I'll clear everything upon installing this update.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

BuckRogers 5y ago

Typing this from Firefox, been typing from Firefox since 2002. Never moved to Chrome. That's probably a small group of people for sure, and I'm actually happy with this update, and the changes Mozilla has been making. I do think, completely against the grain of most Firefox fans, that they should've moved to Chromium ages ago. That would solve the reason people are actually leaving.. issues with Google properties. I have my mother in-law on Edge because there's less issues when she jumps on her karate class using Google Meets. There should be someone out there to battle Blink, I suppose, but without user share at all, how do you hold any weight anyway? It really doesn't make sense, the argument people make. It's usershare first, then you have weight to put towards web standards. And I'm afraid Mozilla doesn't have the resources and willpower to fight that battle anyway. If I'm calling shots with Firefox I'm moving to Chromium immediately and then focusing on UI and privacy features. It's probably too late to make that change though. I just read Firefox lost 50 million monthly users in the last two years. It's a little sad, there is room in the market for a 3rd party, power user's browser but it's obvious as can be that whatever browser that will be- it will be on Chromium and it won't be Firefox.

newscracker 5y ago

This would be even more better with a “Forget this site” button that could be added to the toolbar (if the user wishes to). Clicking on it would clear everything for the site and close the tab. The nested menus to access it aren’t very convenient. I do use CookieAutoDelete to handle this for closed tabs.

teddyfrozevelt 5y ago
You can mostly do this through the lock icon with the "Clear cookies and site data" button.
- jaytaylor 5y ago
  Never knew about this functionality, thanks for sharing! It even appears to exist and work in Chrome.
- SimeVidas 5y ago
  Is “Clear cookies and site data” the same as “Forget about this site”? Firefox could use a simpler UI.
sovnade 5y ago
Ooh I like this idea. Going to look into CookiesAutoDelete. Thank you!
potamic 5y ago
I tried CookieAutoDelete but it seems to be whitelist based only? How do I instead say block only these domains?
- throwaway64643 5y ago
  No, there are two types of rule in Cookie AutoDelete (CAD) that you have to read through their documentation to understand their function: Greylist and Whitelist. You have assign these domains to Greylist (whose filter setting has to be pre-configured first, namely you decide what to be kept/removed in greylist rule). I use in combination with Firefox containers feature Enable Automatic Cleaning of CAD, which deletes all cookies (as well domain related contents) except those in whitelist. That has saved me a lot of time in manual greylisting.

_trampeltier 5y ago

I wish they would build a desktop version of Firefix Focus (Android). One big big button and everything is throwed away.

tsjq 5y ago
Ctrl+Shift+Delete does that ?

nimbius 5y ago

>cookie handling that lets you fully erase your browser history for any website. how about allowing me to whitelist and blacklist cookies from a button? why did that feature have to disappear in the first place? instead I now have a menu in about:preferences#privacy that requires a full URL to be entered, added with a button, then confirmed with "save" in what appears to be an effort to get me to just accept cookies. whats worse is if i switch between allow cookies, and then back to custom, my selection to block all cookies isnt honored at all. instead i get put back into 'block third party cookies.' finally theres the misery of including blocked sites in the 'preferences' you can delete as part of your browser history, which seems like an effort to further reduce my predictable and consistent ability to block cookies altogether.

nashashmi 5y ago

Damn it Firefox. Your cookie protection system is too damn interrupting and does not provide good enough protection. I don’t want a security “profile” because I don’t fit in to whatever few boxes you have setup. Or maybe I just don’t trust what you do behind that security profile setup. I want my own granular cookie tracking. Steal it from chrome if you have to. It is the best thing since sliced bread. I want a list of every cookie I have got. Just like IE used to do. Just chrome does today. I want to set in the smallest detail which cookies are allowed, which are blocked, and which only last until I close session. I have umatrix and ublock with only my personal filter list. It is not good enough. I want something much like chrome.

mikro2nd 5y ago
"Cookie Autodelete" plugin might be what you want, then. Sadly I don't know what "like chrome" means, so don't know if the plugin's functionality is more-or-less equivalent, since I never use Chrome.
davzie 5y ago
Calm down Veruca Salt

code_duck 5y ago

It sure takes a lot of work from the rest of the community to reduce google and facebook's ability to keep us under constant surveillance. My personal relationship with facebook feels fully abusive at this point.

djhworld 5y ago

I'm a heavy user of the "firefox containers" feature, where I try to isolate the social media sites to their own containers (twitter, facebook etc) and also one for reddit. I've also got one for google products as well as I try to use DDG most of the time. Anyway I wish FF had a feature that broke down the cookies PER container, so I could purge any ones that might have snuck in due to a lapse in my judgement, e.g. if I see facebook cookies in my "twitter" container then I'd like to purge them for that particular container only. FF only allows you to do a global purge. EDIT: I can see this bug was raised 3 years ago which suggests it _used_ to be a feature that got removed, but sounds like it was never put back in/low priority/WONTFIX. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1480175 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1480175

glandium 5y ago
Not the clearest UI, but https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-quick-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-quick-... does what you want.

viktorcode 5y ago

Is it any different from "manage website data" in Safari? I use it to make sites forget about me.

devwastaken 5y ago

The benefit of this also fixes bugs. Weather.com bugged on me because it uses supercookies, it would send me to the wrong link when I clicked in the search bar for my saved location. Had to manually go through and delete all the copies of the same cookies in local storage and other places they put it. The next step is for Firefox to finally adopt torbrowser, and natively support not allowing fingerprinting by default.

autoexec 5y ago
Offtopic, but since you brought it up and outed yourself as a user, what's the appeal of weather.com vs weather.gov? The .com collects and sells your data with 3rd parties and I'm guessing they get much of their data from the national weather service anyway. Is there some service/feature that draws you to them?

idoubtit 5y ago

If you disallow third party cookies, then there is no use for this per website cookie jar. I've browsed the web like this for decades (since Opera 9, IIRC), and I had problems with at most 5 websites. YMMV, of course. In my opinion, the simplest way to deal with cookies is to disallow third party, and to keep a white list of authorized websites. Cookies outside this white list should be deleted manually or automatically after a few hours. Extensions for this probably exist, but I've had bad experiences with extensions breaking or becoming intrusive, so I made my own where I hard coded the domains that I want to keep.

lazyweb 5y ago
I'm using FF almost exactly the same way as you describe, and have found the "Forget Me Not" addon to be great. Not allowing 3rd party cookies at all via browser settings, then the addon deletes all cookies for a specific site after closing the tab. Having a whitelist with 5-6 sites where I keep cookies forever.
rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... is great
amelius 5y ago
But the technique does not scale. I.e., if more people start using this, then at some point companies may start blocking people.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Not if this becomes the default in browsers with meaningful market share. Also, blocking people who use privacy settings can be legally iffy. Many sites are already on thin ice, telling people to use their browser settings if they don't want tracking cookies. Forcing tracking like that sounds like a recipe to receive an expensive lesson in GDPR.
  - 5y ago

mousepilot 5y ago

Firefox 90+ doesn't even run for me. Bog standard ubuntu 20.04. These guys have really lost their mojo. I have to stick with the 7x lts versions.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> lets you fully erase your browser history for any website I just want a button to whitelist a domain and an option to automatically clear 100% of everything outside the whitelisted domains on every restart. And always clean the cache, perhaps even for whitelisted domains unless the system is on a metered/slow connection. Also, every website should always be opened in a separate "container" so cross-site tracking won't work. If Chrome did that today this would trigger a cascade of consequences. If Firefox did that today it would just improve Firefox popularity and cause no problems.

adwf 5y ago
As a number of people above mentioned, Cookie AutoDelete extension for FF does exactly this. Sites start out default clearing all cookies the moment you clear the tab. Greylisting clears them when you close the browser. Whitelist retains all cookies. Multi-account Container and Temporary Container extensions take care of your per-tab container needs.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Although I use Cookie AutoDelete and open GMail (which I didn't whitelist) in a separate container, GMail still remembers me somehow. I have to manually go and clear all the saved data in the Firefox settings to actually reset everything.
  - bostonvaulter2 5y ago
    It sounds like you're hitting a Firefox bug affecting Cookie AutoDelete. Something about the recent changes to cookies has prevented extensions from clearing partitioned cookies.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

There is a simple way to do cookie clearing outside the browser. Insert the header Clear-Site-Data^1 into the HTTP response via local proxy^2: 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Clear-Site-Data https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cl... 2. http-response add-header Clear-Site-Data "*"

II2II 5y ago

An observation from their animated demonstration: the recent history includes sites like Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter yet the site they choose to forget about is Hacker News. It was worth a chuckle. As a heavy user of Multi-account Containers, I will be interested to see how this feature interacts with it. I use containers to maintain multiple profiles on websites and loosing all the data for those websites after clearing cookies can be frustrating.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

I'd love to see a toggle button on the URL bar for every website. By default it's off, and it means that cookies as deleted as soon as I close the last tab for that website. Clicking it whitelists the website and cookies are retained until I turn it off again. This is kind of like the approach we had in the nineties. You used to get a prompt for each website, asking if you wanted to allow cookies or not. This is like a second iteration on that.

bostonvaulter2 5y ago
This is pretty much exactly what Cookie AutoDelete does. I love it. Although there's a Firefox bug currently that's preventing many cookies from being deleted which has been annoying, but should hopefully be resolved soon.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

And this is also the release where they drop the support for disabling "Proton" UI and therefore Firefox will no longer respect my system color scheme, and I will lose even more vertical space. Thanks...

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Look at this shit! [1] Who designed this garbage?! [1] https://hypertele.fi/temp/firefox-ui.png https://hypertele.fi/temp/firefox-ui.png
climb_stealth 5y ago
Noooooooooooooo. I just updated and ran into this as well. It is still possible to enable the compact mode from about:config but it looks like the new tab style can't be easily changed anymore. Oh well, see if it still hurts in a few days.

mrgill 5y ago

Firefox is amazing.