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Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

I have third-party cookies disabled, and have for years. A non-exhaustive list of sites where I have login or other problems as a result:

1) One of my local banks (who use weird third-party hosted modules for some of their functionality).

2) Verizon.

3) T-Mobile

If I were a normal user, any one of these ("I have to do _what_ to see my FIOS bill?") could be a show-stopper.

Which is what makes it hard to turn this on by default without driving away users.

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On the other hand, if third-party cookies were going away for real, this would force website developers to finally fix their crap.

Leads to a prisoner's dilemma situation. A move like that has to be done by everyone in concert (example: killing Flash), or it's harmful to the one browser that blinks first.

This thread contains plenty of examples of legitimate uses for third-party cookies. If FF instantly and immediately broke those, users would be cursing, not praising Firefox, and switching to a browser that doesn't break what they use.

Can't we whitelist some of third-party cookies for the transition period?

If they were going away for real across all browsers, yes.

Historically getting some browsers on board with that program has been very difficult.

Concretely: a large fraction of website developers would much rather put up "only works in Chrome" notices than fix their crap.

[Disclaimer: I used to work at Mozilla, and have done my share of trying to push for turning off third-party cookies.]

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