Here’s a fun one, try to find the setting in Firefox 2 for blocking third party cookies (cookies set by demographic tracking/ad serving systems like DoubleClick). Look as you might, it’s not there. I’ve long been a Firefox fan but this really pisses me off. They’ve squandered my loyalty.
They say they removed it because it gave a false sense of security to the users. What would have been the problem with having a comment area below the check box that says, “Blocking third party cookies is not always effective. You should only browse sites which you trust.”?
So the logic is that because the setting was only effective 90% of the time but we don’t want people to expect it to be effective 100% of the time we’re going to completely remove the setting from the user interface…? If this weren’t shareware I’d wonder who was paid off to get this bone headed decision pushed through… maybe that’s still a good question.
The good news is you can still set Firefox 2 to block third party cookies, but you have to do it manually:
1. In the address bar where you’d normally type in a web address, type about:config
2. In the Filter box type the word network
3. Scroll down to the line that says network.cookie.cookieBehavior
3. Right click the line and click modify
4. Set the value to 1 (if you upgraded from an earlier version of Firefox it may be already set)
The even better news is that Apple’s Safari 3.0 beta has been released for both Mac and Windows and it still has a setting in the user interface for blocking third party cookies. I’ll miss some of my Firefox plugins but I’m now going to give Safari an earnest chance to earn my respect.