Firefox 86 Brings “Total Cookie Protection” to Maximize User Privacy

• Firefox 86 is giving one cookie jar to each website, preventing cross-site tracking.
• The system will have some browsing-experience-related exceptions by detecting the user's intention.
• Firefox has lost the browser war, but the product continues to offer compelling privacy-protection features.

The latest version of the Firefox web browser is introducing a new cookie management system that was specifically created to upgrade user privacy protection. Called Total Cookie Protection, it is basically a system that helps keep each set of cookies available only to the site that created them.

So, when the user visits another site, previously active cookies are being disabled. This essentially prevents cookie-based tracking, one of the most prevalent and nasty data collection practices today.

To prevent cross-site cookies without creating functional trouble or degrading the browsing experience, the Total Cookie Protection system will actively detect the user’s intention. It will also give the provider permission to use the cookie on sites beyond its origin.

Of course, this may not work perfectly every time, but this is something understandable when using aggressive privacy protection mechanisms. The new feature will be added to the ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection) system and the “Strict Mode” in particular.

Another positive side-effect of adding this new cookie partitioning system on Firefox is the prevention of browser tagging, which is another pervasive cross-site tracking technique used by websites. The work for this started on Firefox 85 when Mozilla launched a war against supercookies by partitioning pooled, prefetch, pre-connect, and speculative connections, as well as TLS session identifiers.

Other important new features and changes that have landed on Firefox 86 include the following:

• Support for simultaneous Picture-in-Picture video watching.
• Improved print functionality with a cleaner design and better integration with OS settings.
• Credit card management and auto-fill are now enabled for Canadian users.
• Reader mode now works with local HTML pages.
• Stack clash attack protection/mitigation has been activated for Linux and Android.
• DTLS 1.0 has been deprecated, and DTLS 1.2 is now the minimum.

Firefox’s market share continues to shrink, and Mozilla appears unable to put an end to user bleeding. For January 2021, Statcounter reports a share of 3.65%, while the more tech-savvy ‘W3Schools’ gives Firefox 6.7%.

It is clear that the pressure from Chrome and Chrome-based browsers has pushed the once-popular browser to Safari and Opera territory and forced Mozilla to diversify. Still, Firefox is an amazing product and its privacy protection features, in particular, have nothing to envy from other web browsers.