Firefox (v85) to ship 'network partitioning' as a new anti-tracking defense

silversurfer

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Source: Firefox to ship 'network partitioning' as a new anti-tracking defense | ZDNet
Firefox 85, scheduled to be released next month, in January 2021, will ship with a feature named Network Partitioning as a new form of anti-tracking protection.
The feature is based on "Client-Side Storage Partitioning," a new standard currently being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium's Privacy Community Group.
"Network Partitioning is highly technical, but to simplify it somewhat; your browser has many ways it can save data from websites, not just via cookies," privacy researcher Zach Edwards told ZDNet in an interview this week.
"These other storage mechanisms include the HTTP cache, image cache, favicon cache, font cache, CORS-preflight cache, and a variety of other caches and storage mechanisms that can be used to track people across websites."
Edwards says all these data storage systems are shared among websites. The difference is that Network Partitioning will allow Firefox to save resources like the cache, favicons, CSS files, images, and more, on a per-website basis, rather than together, in the same pool. This makes it harder for websites and third-parties like ad and web analytics companies to track users since they can't probe for the presence of other sites' data in this shared pool.
According to Mozilla, the following network resources will be partitioned starting with Firefox 85:
  • HTTP cache
  • Image cache
  • Favicon cache
  • Connection pooling
  • StyleSheet cache
  • DNS
  • HTTP authentication
  • Alt-Svc
  • Speculative connections
  • Font cache
  • HSTS
  • OCSP
  • Intermediate CA cache
  • TLS client certificates
  • TLS session identifiers
  • Prefetch
  • Preconnect
  • CORS-preflight cache
Read more below:
 

Tutman

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Firefox continues cracking down on tracking with cache partitioning

Mozilla follows Apple's and Google's leads on partitioning, then one-ups them.


Firefox version 85 will be released in January 2021, and one of its features is increased user privacy via improvements in client-side storage (cache) partitioning. This has been widely and incorrectly reported elsewhere as network partitioning, likely due to confusion around the privacy.partition.network state flag in Firefox, which allows advanced users to enable or disable cache partitioning as desired.
 
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silversurfer

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Would this new feature make temporary containers redundant"?
No serious answer yet, probably it takes a long while until all "features" will be included into a stable version of Firefox:

According to Mozilla, the following network resources will be partitioned starting with Firefox 85 [...]

Just to remember, even more important security feature still under development:
 

HarborFront

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In Firefox 84, you can already enable the “client-side storage partitioning.” Go to about:config, and set “privacy.partition.network_state” to True. While the isolation of these resources can improve your tracking resistance, it might negatively impact your web browser’s browsing performance.

 

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