Firefox and cookie micromanagement

Firefox and cookie micromanagement

Posted Mar 24, 2016 9:35 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973)
Parent article: Firefox and cookie micromanagement

OK, it was this specific issue that finally made me drop Firefox, when I'd been a user since before it was even called that. (I thought about going to the physical Mozilla launch party; I didn't go, but I did think strongly about it.)

First, this objection is baseless:

The underlying assumption here is that it is possible for a user to assess whether you should accept a cookie based on the modal dialog. That is fundamentally not the case because you cannot know a-priori whether that cookie is used "just" for tracking or for login functionality.

Here's how I used the feature. I clicked Allow for Session, always. And I'd check the 'do the same for all cookies from this site'. This meant that essentially all websites worked perfectly, but their cookies evaporated when I closed the browser. The next time I visited them, I'd be all shiny new, and I wouldn't have to click anything. Their cookies would be evanescent. No matter how many times I returned, I'd be a brand-new user on each visit. My experience would be basically identical to what someone with permanent cookies would see, but then all the local tracking data went poof. This was a great feature.

In the rare case where I actually did need a website to retain data, like my login cookies for lwn, then I'd just Allow. Very occasionally, I decided I wanted to stay logged in on a site after using it for awhile, and in those cases, I'd go into the config pages, and change that site's settings to Allow. This was a little painful, but happened so rarely that it wasn't much of a hassle.

So: my use case was perfectly tuned to the feature, and its removal meant I ended up accumulating tracking cookies for weeks before I noticed. They didn't just stop asking, they also silently stopped honoring the underlying settings. I actually spotted it when I went into settings to explain to someone how to duplicate what I was doing, and realized that I no longer could. (I hadn't noticed that the popups had stopped, because I got so few of them anymore.)

And this absolutely infuriated me. This struck me as the heart of what's wrong with modern Mozilla; user welfare has been pushed way down their priority list. They're jamming crap down my throat that's not good for me, and isn't for my benefit. Rather, they're pushing things that are good for Mozilla, like that Pocket payware abscess. The fundamental disrespect in just silently ignoring a privacy setting.... god, that's just so blatantly rude. It was good for them, but it was sure as heck not good for me.

I mean, couldn't they have freaking deprecated it for a release? Every time I blink they've got a new version. Surely they could have given me a warning message that the feature was going away in the following release, six entire weeks later. Ideally, they should have given me an alternate method, and converted my existing settings. But, even if they didn't want to invest that much engineering time, they couldn't be arsed to implement a popup for a couple revs so we'd know about the problem? Instead of taking the time to analyze things properly, they explicitly decided to ignore my carefully expressed wishes without any warning whatsoever.

I used to love Mozilla, but I no longer believe that's mutual. And I was a paying customer, after a fashion, donating money at the end of each year. I gave more money to Mozilla than I gave to freaking Consumer Reports. No more; I'm on Chromium now.

It was pretty hard to get the same 'almost everything goes away' setting in Chromium. It tends to accumulate a lot more data than Firefox does, especially site local storage, which I think is a Chrome-specific, cookie-like function. Fortunately, I found a nice workaround: a combination of the "Vanilla Cookie Manager" extension, and setting all data to be evanescent. ("Keep local data only until you quit your browser.") When you close the last Chromium window, Vanilla kicks in, saves any cookies from sites you've whitelisted, and then Chromium nukes pretty much everything else except history, which, sadly, has to be manually erased. There is a bug there, though: Vanilla doesn't seem to trigger if you choose the Quit option from the pulldown menu, so if you quit that way, your permanent cookies will be lost. (I wanted to report the bug, but the author is explicitly uninterested in bug reports: he says that he will accept only pull requests on Github. I don't think that's working very well, because at least when I last looked, it's had no activity for ages.)

I'm pretty comfortable, these days. The set of extensions I settled on: Alternate Tab Order (so tabs open like they do in Firefox), uBlock Origin, uMatrix (also from gorhill: an absolutely SUPERB noscript-style utility), and Tampermonkey, to run some user scripts that Chromium won't run natively. And I'm real happy. I used Firefox since before it was Firefox, and they finally drove me away. And their market share drops another 0.00001%.

It just makes me terribly sad. I once loved Mozilla. I gave them money. But I'm no longer convinced they're on my side. This was so poorly handled that my trust in them was finally broken, and I don't think they can get it back.

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