Firefox 91 introduces enhanced cookie clearing (opens in new tab)

No -- it's just how cookies were meant to work from the start, the most obvious implementation before the privacy/security/tracking implications got worked out, which has taken many years.

And Google's working to make similar improvements to Chrome:

https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...

So not "insane" at all. To the contrary, it was entirely reasonable at the beginning, and now we see browsers reasonably addressing the problems that have arisen.

Historically cookies weren't partitioned by site. So if you went to clear the cookies for https://publisher.example, then the browser wouldn't know whether to also clear cookies for https://other.example.

(Cookies are still not partitioned by default in Firefox; it requires turning on Total Cookie Protection)

If it didn't come with all the tracking and privacy implications, being able to see your friends' comments on a site first, use social widgets etc. is a feature.

This will also break some sites, some of which will never get fixed, so this is a hard change to make (but necessary at this point).

Also, blocking people who use privacy settings can be legally iffy. Many sites are already on thin ice, telling people to use their browser settings if they don't want tracking cookies. Forcing tracking like that sounds like a recipe to receive an expensive lesson in GDPR.

It even appears to exist and work in Chrome.

Then Cookie AutoDelete (CAD) is exact what you'd want. Firefox has a setting option that deletes all cookies except exception after the browser is closed. But in my opinion, that function is too limited. CAD filters domains on container level, while Firefox's doesn't. CAD also offers regex matching for domains, which is really useful. My favorite feature is greylisting everything in Default Firefox's container (using * regex for greylist).

CAD is compatible and best used with Firefox's Multi-Account Container.

It will take a bit to learn how it works though.

At least Firefox 90.x has a checkbox "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" in the privacy section, along with a button to "Manage exceptions..."

In settings for CAD, enable container support

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

I use in combination with Firefox containers feature Enable Automatic Cleaning of CAD, which deletes all cookies (as well domain related contents) except those in whitelist. That has saved me a lot of time in manual greylisting.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

Does that also mean you never learned about Rabbie Burns in school?

I did find it striking that the same stat for Gaelic was just over 50k in contrast: while I know the level of Gaelic spoken in Scotland is extremely low, it's at least a better known language internationally than Scots is, so I would've expected it to be the more spoken of the two.

To test this theory, I just asked my mother in law (who is from the central belt) about Scots, and she replied, quite seriously: "Whits that? I dinnae ken whit that is, I spik proper!"

(I'm Scottish, from the North East)

(Scottish Firefox developer)

It's up to the linguistic community to decide that, if their variety should be considered a "dialect" of something else or a "language" on its own. Linguists already gave up that question, it's more useful to talk about varieties anyway.

And it's the same deal with Galician versus Portuguese, with a difference - "Scots is a dialect of English" threatens Scots, but "Portuguese is a dialect of Galician" doesn't threaten Portuguese (it threatens Galician instead).

Beware fighting words

> Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300)

> As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.

You are probably thinking of Scottish English or Scots English, which is essentially English of some words and phrases from Scots and a very strong accent.

Scots proper is as much a language of its own as English is.

Scots and what we now think of as English arguably have a similar age and a lot of shared heritage, though obviously given how much separation, invading and other reasons for variation & remixing of languages has gone on over time, it is tricky to tie down completely what came from where when.

Ahh whisht man.

:-)

That said, I find I often have to mentally pronounce the various written forms in order to be able to understand them.

Font size is set to really low (titles on the homepage are 10px, comments are even smaller).

I can read it fine at 100%, it just requires a bit more mental struggle in the age where font sizes are usually in 16/18px range.

    div.comment {
        line-height: 1.5
    }

    td {
        max-width: 700px;
    }

The smallest font on this page is 9px, that's just ludicrous.

I mean just open the CSS file and judge for yourself.

- specify which websites may store cookies/cache. All websites not specified can not store anything (and thus not track me), and all data for these websites is deleted once i close the tab

- i want to remember all my history

I can do this in Firefox on macOS (with some container extensions, can’t remember the names now)

My experience is this also includes your cookie preferences which means if you don't enable that single option, you'll have to go through the steps to disable cookies pretty much every time you visit.

It turns out that those third party "consent form in a box" solutions tend to have settings to let the website operators choose how user-hostile the popup is supposed to be. It's a shame the DPAs are all understaffed, incompetent, unwilling, or willfully looking away (e.g. in the case of Ireland) instead of taking expensive enforcement action against companies that violate it.

A few expensive examples and every site would have a top-level, equally visible "reject all" button, and after a while, sites would realize that with 90% of people choosing that, they might as well skip that popup and assume rejection.

Those popups aren't mandatory at all, sites can simply respect your privacy by default.

I am annoyed that Firefox mobile tabs seem to have to refresh every single time I "tab out". I'm stubbornly sticking to it because of addons though (Dark Reader and uBlock).