Why does your new Account feature force the use of third-party cookies?
I have cookies enabled, but block third-party cookies because of the abusive way they're used. Firefox tells me "Cookies and local storage are required Please enable cookies and local storage in your browser to access Firefox Accounts. "
Why would you spend years developing the most private browser we can lay our hands on and then force the use of third-party cookies that would violate all that effort? Setting it up so you *can* use cookies if you want to makes sense, but why wouldn't you provide a path to use the service without having to lay yourself open to all kinds of prying and spying, the very antithesis of what Mozilla claims is the fundamental purpose of Firefox?
Chosen solution
Hi flopwich, "third party" means a different host name for a server. Mozilla uses many different server addresses, such as
- Mozilla Add-ons site => addons.mozilla.org
- Firefox Account sign-in => accounts.firefox.com
Apparently third party cookies are used to connect the dots when you want to sign in to the Add-ons site using your Firefox account, or to use other services that require signing into your Firefox Account. Is there another way to set that up without third party cookies? I don't know. If this is unacceptable, don't use the affected services.
Workarounds?
You can set Firefox to accept third party cookies only for the current session, so they are automatically deleted when you exit Firefox. In theory, this limits the duration of tracking and makes your use on one day difficult to connect with your use on the next.
Of course, you also can use purpose-built tools to block trackers and ads, which I assume are the most problematic users of third party cookies. Firefox even has an optional Tracking Protection feature built in. See: What happened to Tracking Protection?.
Would you be interested in tips related to any of those approaches?
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I highly doubt that is from FF most likely it is coming from the site and is presented to FF. FF doesn't ask for nor install cookies that comes the site your going to.
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Hi flopwich, "third party" means a different host name for a server. Mozilla uses many different server addresses, such as
- Mozilla Add-ons site => addons.mozilla.org
- Firefox Account sign-in => accounts.firefox.com
Apparently third party cookies are used to connect the dots when you want to sign in to the Add-ons site using your Firefox account, or to use other services that require signing into your Firefox Account. Is there another way to set that up without third party cookies? I don't know. If this is unacceptable, don't use the affected services.
Workarounds?
You can set Firefox to accept third party cookies only for the current session, so they are automatically deleted when you exit Firefox. In theory, this limits the duration of tracking and makes your use on one day difficult to connect with your use on the next.
Of course, you also can use purpose-built tools to block trackers and ads, which I assume are the most problematic users of third party cookies. Firefox even has an optional Tracking Protection feature built in. See: What happened to Tracking Protection?.
Would you be interested in tips related to any of those approaches?
Try to create a cookie allow exception for accounts.firefox.com to see if that has effect.
Do you have any content blocking extensions?