The question (not addressed in the article) is: is there in fact a gigantic, widespread problem of using cache-sniffing to fingerprint users?
We have always known that this was possible, yet continued to include cross site caching anyway because of the enormous benefits. Presumably something fairly major has recently happened in order for this functionality to be removed- if so what?
Safari (who make a big deal about being privacy-conscious) was the first to introduce cache partitioning, looking into it as far back as 2013[1]; Chrome followed in 2020 and Firefox in 2021[3]. One thing I know, anecdotally, to be a strong motivator among browser vendors is ‘X is doing it, why aren’t we?’
1. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110269
2. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning
3. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-pro...