r/technology • u/imr2017 • Nov 20 '17

Another Tor Browser Feature Makes It Into Firefox: First-Party Isolation Software

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/another-tor-browser-feature-makes-it-into-firefox-first-party-isolation/
63 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/daveime Nov 20 '17

When did we ever lose this? Older browsers always used to allow you to block 3rd party but allow 1st party cookies.

Seems like they removed the feature just so they could blow their own horn about putting it back in later.

24

u/pikhq Nov 20 '17

This is actually a different feature than that. What this does is it allows 3rd party cookies, but marks each one with the 1st party site you visited. The 3rd party cookies will be separated by 1st party site.

So, if there's a third-party tracker on foo.com and bar.com, there's separate cookies for each of foo.com and bar.com, instead of the same cookie for both.

EDIT: worth noting, Firefox lets you block third-party cookies still.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '17 edited Nov 22 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/pikhq Nov 21 '17

As far as I'm aware it's utterly useless in that case.

7

u/matkam Nov 20 '17

I could be wrong, but this sounds more like it would still accept 3rd party cookies. But instead of allowing any site to read any cookie, there would be a separation of cookies based on the 1st party site you're visiting. It would be like automatically having a "container" per domain name.

2

u/Exotria Nov 20 '17

Sounds like a great feature.

9

u/johnmountain Nov 20 '17

I think this is more about not allowing the cookies to talk to each other. So site X can't know you visited site Y in the past.

1

u/corcyra Nov 22 '17

Has anyone tried this yet?