It appears Safari is just blocking the cookies, while Firefox is isolating the cookies. I guess Safari has to keep track of who to block while Firefox just isolates everybody. Are there other benefits to the Firefox approach?
Frankly, I have a hard time understanding why this Cookie Sandbox approach wasn't implemented a long time ago. I get that 25 years ago we weren't concerned about privacy, but there has been plenty of time to fix this. Advertiser influence?
I believe this is part of the "Prevent cross-site tracking" feature. I do know that Webkit/Safari has had this feature for a while now, under the name "Partitioned storage." Safari has a handful of other policies under the "Intelligent Tracking Prevention" banner, like blocked or ephemeral cookies for non-first-party domains.
Firefox is playing catch-up with this feature. The announcement says "...making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows and Mac." Note the part that I've emphasized.
Thanks. In case anyone is interested, I looked around a bit more and found these descriptions of Safari's (Webkit) intelligent tracking prevention starting from 2017 (in reverse chronological order):
That addon has links with info and just twiddles an about:config setting. It can break things (for example some ways Paypal is used by websites, although other ways work fine). There has also been the ability to block third party cookies for a very long time, possibly as long as there have been cookies, but it can also break things. As I understand it Total Cookie Protection is similar to these but with some exceptions so that not much breaks that users would notice.
https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/prevent-cross-site-tr...
It appears Safari is just blocking the cookies, while Firefox is isolating the cookies. I guess Safari has to keep track of who to block while Firefox just isolates everybody. Are there other benefits to the Firefox approach?
Frankly, I have a hard time understanding why this Cookie Sandbox approach wasn't implemented a long time ago. I get that 25 years ago we weren't concerned about privacy, but there has been plenty of time to fix this. Advertiser influence?