[Infowarrior] - Firefox 44 Deletes Fine-Grained Cookie Management

[Richard Forno]

Rick's Reaction:  [witholds comment to keep this a PG post]	


Firefox 44 Deletes Fine-Grained Cookie Management (mozilla.org) 69

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 04, 2016 @05:39PM from the like-my-cookies-smooth dept.

ewhac writes: Among its other desirable features, Firefox included a feature allowing very fine-grained cookie management. When enabled, every time a Web site asked to set a cookie, Firefox would raise a dialog containing information about the cookie requested, which you could then approve or deny. An "exception" list also allowed you to mark selected domains as "Always allow" or "Always deny", so that the dialog would not appear for frequently-visited sites. It was an excellent way to maintain close, custom control over which sites could set cookies, and which specific cookies they could set. It also helped easily identify poorly-coded sites that unnecessarily requested cookies for every single asset, or which would hit the browser with a "cookie storm" — hundreds of concurrent cookie requests.

Mozilla quietly deleted this feature from Firefox 44, with no functional equivalent put in its place. Further, users who had enabled the "Ask before accept" feature have had that preference silently changed to, "Accept normally." The proffered excuse for the removal was that the feature was unmaintained, and that its users were, "probably crashing multiple times a day as a result" (although no evidence was presented to support this assertion). Mozilla's apparent position is that users wishing fine-grained cookie control should be using a third-party add-on instead, and that an "Ask before accept" option was, "not really nice to use on today's Web."

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/04/2221204/firefox-44-deletes-fine-grained-cookie-management

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