Hacker News Reader

Comment by devmunchies | Hacker News Reader

So if i have a product that uses 3rd party cookies to try and enhance the user experience (saving user progress in a 3rd party service for user convenience), whats the alternative to 3rd party cookies?

Bad actors are making it harder for people who want to use cookies for enhancing the experience rather than analytics and marketing.

View on HN

> enhance the user experience

Sorry, but this made me laugh.

> whats the alternative to 3rd party cookies?

Don't use a 3rd party service.

yes, saving user progress is enhancing their experience. you hear 3rd party and immediately think its bad.

> Don't use a 3rd party service.

I knew someone would say this, as if I had unlimited dev time.

The third party service can provide you with some JavaScript you inject into your website. It stores cookies on your domain instead of a third party one.

Which of course begs the question should third party scripts be allowed to run?

You don't need cross-origin scripts for this: you can host it yourself.

If you were to disallowed loading scripts cross-origin, everyone would just end up creating subdomains for everything you wanted to load, which would be worse security-wise I bet, as you'd lose some of the cross origin security features we have today.

You shouldn't use the term enhancing user experience. It’s a synonym for doing something against the interest of the user.

I think the traditional approach is to make them 1st-party, by setting up a subdomain, like '3rdparty.yourdomain.com' and forward requests to it to '3rdparty.com.'

Microservices. You track state yourself, call their service and shuttle the data back and forth, all on your servers. The user touches one endpoint and sees one cert.

Can you store user progress in the cookie, or Local Storage etc, instead of involving a third party?

its for things that are ephemeral and nice-to-have for the user but not worth it for me to build myself when there are more important things to work on. dang, i had a nice thing going.

Only curious, I don't know what you're using it for lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com