Mozilla Firefox needs a cookie diet ("about:config"")

Completely and utterly unrelated.

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kittyshark
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Mozilla Firefox needs a cookie diet ("about:config"")

Post by kittyshark »

I thought you guys might want to peek at this Mozilla Firefox "about:config" setting...

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It's where you can set the cookie limit (per session, I guess) to be "1" (one) instead of "3000" or whatever insane defaults are already there.

It's along the same lines as limiting the maximum number of connections:

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I find that if you set the numbers too low, you get hardly any web browser multitasking between tabs/sites/pages; and that's EXACTLY WHAT I WANT.
It's nice, because then, all of a sudden, your internet connection might not get as bogged down by connections to "doubleclick.net" and all the google ad syndication garbage, etc which is so hard to block out.

Of course, there's always the gamut of extensions/addons from mozilla, but this technique kinda helps.

Also, with the cookies, each site really only needs only 1 singular single solitary cookie, and really no more than that.
For that matter, the entire web browser can usually function with just one cookie at a time too.
With these harder limits, some obnoxious stuff might not work, but that's OK.

You might find you're getting fewer ads on YouTube that way.

Last but not least, I seem to find that I get a lot more interruptions from advertisements on USA/American YouTube compared to all other YouTube domain/locales/countries/ethnicities.

For example, I try to open any YouTube video from YouTube.com and there's a long delay sometimes, or just several ads in a row before the video plays. And yet for the same exact video, yet from YouTube.fr (France), for example, I get the video immediately without any ads or maybe just one advertisement instead of several.

I think it means that USA/American web culture is more advertisement saturated and controlled, and that maybe other parts of the world have more "net neutrality" when it comes to this stuff.

I mention this with the goal of making it easier for anybody to watch tutorial videos or video instructions or whatever without having to watch a ton of quasilocal political campaign advertisements or PEPSI commercials when we just want to learn about pro audio music-making with linux computers or maybe something else like that.

Good luck.

P.S. = don't forget to enable "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled" also.

There's really a lot of stuff hidden in "about:config" which kinda proves that the web browser makers are not 100% honest with us about their features and implementations.

EDIT: if "1" connection is not enough, just do "2" if that fixes webpage issues. (per server/site/page)
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sunrat
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Re: Mozilla Firefox needs a cookie diet ("about:config"")

Post by sunrat »

Interesting idea to change the max cookie defaults, haven't heard of that one.
There are a handful of extensions that help to deal with cookies and advertisements.
- I don't care about cookies - blocks all those "Accept cookies?" popups
- uBlock Origin - blocks ads
- AutoCookieDelete - removes cookies except for whitelist
- Privacy Badger - blocks trackers

There are several guides on the internetz about hardening Firefox. I like this one -
Firefox Privacy – The Complete How-To Guide for 2022
And of course there's the user.js template from Arkenfox if you really want to go deep -
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/2.1-User.js
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