Firefox Continues Cracking Down on Tracking With Cache Partitioning
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Firefox continues cracking down on tracking with cache partitioning:
Firefox version 85 will be released in January 2021, and one of its features is increased user privacy via improvements in client-side storage (cache) partitioning. This has been widely and incorrectly reported elsewhere as network partitioning, likely due to confusion around the privacy.partition.network_state flag in Firefox, which allows advanced users to enable or disable cache partitioning as desired.
What is cache partitioning-and why might I want it?
In a nutshell, cache partitioning is the process of keeping separate cache pools for separate websites, based on the site requesting the resources loaded, rather than simply on the site providing the resources.
[...] For a more detailed discussion of client-side storage partitioning, see the W3C Privacy Community Group's work item on the topic, at https://github.com/privacycg/storage-partitioning.
What's the downside to cache partitioning?
There are some Web resources which are legitimately used near-universally across thousands or millions of sites-for example, embedded fonts being delivered from fonts.google.com. With a globally scoped cache, site1.com might embed a copy of the Roboto font from fonts.google.com, and when site2.com through site999.com embed the same font, it can be delivered from the browser cache.
Although this will be the broadest userdata cache partitioning scheme in production once launched, Mozilla is playing catch-up in deploying one at all. Apple began partitioning Safari's browser cache in 2013 and has continued to partition it further since, and Google partitioned Chrome's HTTP cache beginning with Chrome 86, released in early October.
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