Firefox protects you with Total Cookie Protection: stop online tracking

Mozilla Firefox brings with it, in the latest version, a very interesting feature for those who are attentive to privacy (and that the browser keeps to respect). We are talking about Total Cookie Protection , a feature that allows users to restrict the field of action of cookies by sites and which will be enabled by default for all users. Mozilla explains that the function "isolates the cookies of the site you are on" , so that it is not possible to use them from another site and stop them "in following you from one site to another".

Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's most effective privacy protection to date , thereby limiting cookies to the site where they were created. This thus prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track navigation from one site to another.

Never before seen protection thanks to Firefox

All this therefore allows to maintain the useful properties of cookies (for example those relating to the maintenance of a session, for example when logging in to a site) consequently eliminating the worst ones , in particular the possibility of tracing the user.

"Whenever a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in the browser, that cookie is limited to the cookie container assigned to that website only. No other website can access containers that do not they belong to him and find out the information present in the cookies of other websites "

But that's just the latest of Firefox's actions to combat trackers . Another example is Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP): launched in 2018, it works by blocking trackers based on a predefined list of "untrusted", a sort of updated blacklist of trackers. If a party is on this list, they lose the ability to use third party cookies. The ETP has been a huge privacy win for Firefox users, but obviously this approach has some shortcomings. If a tracker for some reason isn't on that list, it can still track users and violate their privacy. And if an attacker wants to thwart the ETP, they can set up a new tracking domain that isn't on the list. Total Cookie Protection avoids these problems by limiting functionality for all cookies , not just those in a defined list.

A little background on the Mozilla browser

Mozilla Firefox (known simply as Firefox) is a free, cross-platform web browser maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. Born in 2002 with the name "Phoenix" by members of the Mozilla community , who wanted a stand-alone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle, up to version 56 it used the Gecko rendering engine, supporting most of the new web standards as well as some features that have been designed as extensions to the latter; from version 57, Gecko has been replaced by Quantum, thus arriving at the current version.

Its diffusion reached its peak in 2009 with 32% of users , becoming the most used browser with version 3.5. As we all know, however, Google Chrome arrived and with it began the delcino of the number of users due to competition.

As of January 2022, we find that Google Chrome is the leading Internet browser in the world , with a global market share of 64.91%. In other words, more than six out of ten people use Chrome to browse the Internet. Apple's Safari is in second place with 19.03%, 45.88 percentage points lower than the record. Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox are the next two most used web browsers, with market shares of 3.99% and 3.26% respectively.

The article Firefox protects you with Total Cookie Protection: stop online tracking was written on: Tech CuE | Close-up Engineering .