Hacker News Reader

Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

I blocked third party cookies in Chrome for awhile and finally gave up. It broke a surprising number of things, particularly Disqus embeds. Also the Instapaper bookmarklet although I admit that's a nerdy special case. Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired. That's a hard user interaction to get right.

(Disqus apparently now works without third party cookies: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466235-enabl...)

View on HN

Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired

They do. The title of the bug is "Block cookies from sites I haven't visited" and the blog post[1] explains that any site with 1st party cookies can set 3rd party cookies on other sites. Apparently this is how Safari works too.

[1]http://webpolicy.org/2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-polic...

This is the same behaviour as Safari has had by default for years. App developers that depend on 3rd-party cookies should in general already have the work-arounds in place to support Firefox 22 assuming they already support Safari.

To get sites like Disqus working while blocking third party cookies, just set an exception. I set exceptions for sites like google.com, disqus.com and evernote.com

Same here. I've been blocking third-party cookies in Chrome since the option was available, and have built up a list of exceptions that I'm comfortable with. I don't think it's reasonable that your average user would be able to figure that out though. Usually, it's not obvious at all that third-party cookie blocking is even responsible for feature breakage in the first place.

Disqus not working sounds like a feature to me. What extension were you using?

No extension necessary. Just open chrome://settings/content and check the "block third party cookies" option. Anytime you navigate to a page with blocked 3rd party cookies, a cookie with an X will show in the address bar. Clicking it will let you add an exception.

Ghostery is quite efficient at blocking Disqus, Facebook, G+, and other stuff that people seem to include in their websites nowadays.

Blocking 3rd party cookies breaks surprisingly few things. Sure, a few services might not work but you can add exceptions if you want to use them. Overall it has almost no negative impact on your web experience.

You can use stuff like Ghostery or WidgetBlock, and they have options where you can specifically allow Disqus. I've still ran into some blocked pages early on, but after figuring out what was wrong, and allowing that stuff, now I rarely have any problems and I still block 90% of the rest.

[*.]disqus.com

Add this to exceptions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com