Mozilla has taken the wraps off of the latest version of Firefox, version 91, and it includes significant privacy improvements.
Firefox is already one of the most secure, private browsers on the market today. The browser’s Total Cookie Protection is one of the features contributing to that, preventing companies from tracking you as you browse across websites.
Version 91’s Enhanced Cookie Clearing builds on that even more, making it much easier to clear cookies for a given site, as well as any third-party cookies that may have been embedded in that site.
Let’s say you have visited facebook.com, comfypants.com and mealkit.com. All of these sites store data in Firefox and leave traces on your computer. This data includes typical storage like cookies and localStorage, but also site settings and cached data, such as the HTTP cache. Additionally, comfypants.com and mealkit.com embed a like button from facebook.com.
Embedded third-party resources complicate data clearing. Before Enhanced Cookie Clearing, Firefox cleared data only for the domain that was specified by the user. That meant that if you were to clear storage for comfypants.com, Firefox deleted the storage of comfypants.com and left the storage of any sites embedded on it (facebook.com) behind. Keeping the embedded storage of facebook.com meant that it could identify and track you again the next time you visited comfypants.com.
With Enhanced Cookie Clearing, Firefox will now display a “cookie jar” for each website you’ve visited, collecting the cookies and data from that website, as well as any third-party cookies and data that may have been embedded in it.
Mozilla says that, in order for Enhanced Cookie Clearing to work, users must have Strict Tracking Protection enabled.