Mozilla today announced that Firefox’s anti-tracking feature ‘Total Cookie Protection’ will now be enabled by default in the desktop browser. The feature keeps cookies isolated and prevents tracking companies from accessing them to monitor your web activities.
This feature was introduced back in 2021 but was only available by default if a user switches on Firefox’s privacy mode. Later that year, the feature was enabled by default in private browsing. Now the feature is available to all desktop users without having to toggle anything.
Firefox claims to be the most private and secure desktop browser. It also thinks that making Total Cookie Protection default for all users will make its users safe online.
Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection creates a separate ‘cookie jar’ for each website for storing cookies related to the website. The web tracker cannot access the cookie jar associated with any other website. They can only track users on that individual website. So, they cannot gather much information about you. As it doesn’t completely block cookies, your web experience remains the same but with strong protection against tracking.
In some cases, a website creates cross-site cookies. For example popular third-party login providers. In such cases, websites and login providers will access the same cookie jar for sign-in.
Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection is now available in the latest version of Firefox for desktop. It will be available for Android soon. Android users already have the feature via Mozilla’s privacy-centric “Focus” browser for Android. The company confirmed that this tech cannot come on iOS because of App Store rules preferring Apple’s browser engine.
