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Comment by addandsubtract | Hacker News Reader

I just want temp containers. With all the cookie bullshit you have to pick and choose on each website, I just want to accept it all and then flush the container once I'm done with the website.

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Do you know about the Temporary Containers addon? While it has some quirks, it seems to do exactly what you described, automatically and quite intuitively. I'm a happy user for two years now I think.

Man, I love this plugin. Every time I open a link from HN, CTRL-Click (configured this way) and into a new container it goes. Combine it with Chameleon, and you can really confuse some sites.

How did you do that? Cmd+Click opens links in the same container for me, and I can't find the right setting.

In Temporary Containers settings: Isolation tab, Global, Mouse click. Set "Ctrl/Cmd+Left Mouse" to anything but "Never".

Thank you for this comment! That extension is exactly what I was looking for for a while.

"Cookie AutoDelete"[1] extension might be what you want. It flushes cookies after you close all tabs for a site. There's an allowlist of sites for which to retain cookies.

It's nice when paired with the "I don't care about cookies"[2] extension which auto-accepts cookie requests and makes sure you never see any cookie permission dialogs.

1: https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete

2: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

I don't recommend it as a comprehensive solution because it misses some stuff, such as indexeddb and service workers. For maximum isolation you'd want temporary containers.

Looks like Cookie AutoDelete does support IndexedDB [1] and Service Workers [2] by the way.

[1] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/... [2] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/...

This is news to me. Looks like firefox finally added the requisite APIs. The only issue seems to be that it doesn't play nice with container tabs.

I think Cookie Autodelete does though! There's a setting in the extension preferences to make it aware of containers.

From the linked documentation:

>The API for browsing data cleaning doesn't appear to support Firefox Containers. So if cookies from one container are cleared, then all of that site's data from all containers are deleted regardless of rules.

On Firefox you can select “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed” under the browser privacy and security settings. You white list a bunch of sites you want to stay logged into using the “Manage Exceptions” button. No need for a plug-in. For all other sites you can use Firefox’s remember password feature.

Then, instead of using “I don’t care about cookies” you can simply tick all the boxes in the “Annoyances” section of uBlock Origin. That way you only need one plugin and not three.

That does assume that one closes Firefox, however. While Cookie Autodelete will remove cookies for a site within a few seconds† once the last tab is closed, and correctly handles tabs in containers.

†in case you're redirecting briefly for SSO or similar.

I found that having cookies actively deleted like that often crashes websites inadvertently and it ended up being a pain to manage. Allowing a website to track you for a day or so is not the same as being tracked for months. I believe that it is not nearly as useful to marketers. Closing and reopening my browser after a heavy web session is not a big price for me to pay. I do it to free up resources on my machine anyway.

Sites I log in to I don't clear. Other sites _shouldn't_ be able to tell the difference between deleting cookies and being a fresh visitor. This brings a new problem, in the form of cookie and GDPR banners. But there's an extension for that, too: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/.

Is that different from opening in an incognito window? Genuine question, I don't know how cookies are handled in private windows and what other weirdness they might invite, but they do seem to serve this purpose very well for me. I often 'Open in Private Window' websites that have been linked from reddit or HN but that I don't trust to play nice with my privacy.

You can only have one private window instance, with all your private window contents mixed in that scope. And this instance cannot be discarded until you close every single private window. It would be better to have multiple temporary instances so you don't have different websites mixing and don't need to close everything to reset your session on one site.

Are you sure about that? I was testing some web app earlier this year and everytime I opened a new icognito window I was able to log in again as an other user. Opening another tab in the same window shared the state of the window.

Maybe it's different in Chrome. In FF they all share an instance.

A couple things:

- If you need to restart the browser, temporary containers are persistent. Several times I've lost a session from an incognito window because Firefox wanted to restart and wouldn't let me load any new pages until I did so.

- Pages visited in containers are still included in your browser history, which can be useful if you want to find something again later

- You can have multiple temporary container sessions running at once; while all incognito windows share a session, cookies, etc.

I block all cookies by default with uMatrix (yes, I know.. still using it for now at least though) and then 'Cookie Auto Delete' add-on cleans up anything I whitelist in uMatrix (e.g. to make a checkout work) that I haven't also whitelisted in itself (e.g. I let HN keep a cookie rather than login every day or tab close).

> yes, I know..

Wait, I think I missed something, is uMatrix bad somehow?

It got archieved, meaning the development of it is on hold

Sorry, that was lazy of me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973

It's great, it just might not survive too many Firefox version bumps now. Hopefully there'll be a clear successor fork to switch to before long.

You could just block all cookies and make exceptions to enable them for the few websites that you need to log in.

The only downside is the GDPR warnings keep coming back. I've been making custom CSS and JS injection rules to get rid of GDPR warnings though by removing or hiding them from the DOM -- any Adblock-style plugin to get rid of all of those? If I hide all the GDPR popups with custom CSS, I will have never seen them, and therefore never agreed to them, and if I block cookies they can't track me anyway.

uBlocks "Annoyances" list should cover a lot of cookie and GDPR notifications. If that doesn't go far enough there's also a really great ultra annoyances list that'll unstick and remove just about anything that tries to constantly stick itself on your screen.

https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

Oh thanks, this looks amazing!

It does but very often a site won't let you proceed until you clicked the ok button on their annoying popup. And because the pop-up is blocked, there's no way to proceed then :(

I've seen this on several sites now. Understandable but having to turn off ublock puts you on the radar of all the trackers again.

Maybe we need a more advanced plugin that auto-agrees to all those tracking cookies to make the websites think they got permission and work, but then blocks/deletes those cookies so that they don't actually get to track.

Or even better, if the tracking uses some commonly available libraries, actually mess with their tracking data and send it back so that it's a lost cause on their part to even try to track people. Doubly awesome if FireFox can ship a browser that in its default configuration messes up tracking data with false data (hee hee).

It would be amazing if it could to that! But with the current marketshare of Firefox, it would be a drop in the ocean :)

https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ works in many cases.

use the temporary containers addon... the multi-account containers addon is nice too.

With browser fingerprinting persisting across all these flushes, discarding cookies and trackers won't help. You'll still be identified.

Browser fingerprinting is a problem, but the solution isn't to throw your hands up and spoonfeed them identifiers.

Blocking tracking scripts does thwart fingerprinting. I really hope we can figure out a decent access model for JavaScript someday.

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