In January 2020, Google announced that it would gradually kill third-party cookies in Chrome over the course of two years.īut while it might appear that Apple beat Google to the third-party cookie kill fest, Google actually gets the credit for pushing browsers down the no-tracking path. Mozilla rolled out the privacy enhancement in September 2019, announcing that Firefox would block both tracking cookies and cryptomining by default.īrave also blocks most third-party cookies, though it makes exceptions for a few popular third-party embedded sites. Safari thus joins other browsers that either plan to or are already blocking third-party tracking cookies by default, including the Tor browser.
It might seem like a bigger change than it is.īut we’ve added so many restrictions to ITP since its initial release in 2017 that we are now at a place where most third-party cookies are already blocked in Safari. Is this is a big deal? Not really, Wilander said in a post on the WebKit team’s blog, given that previous work has meant that most cookies are already blocked: What it means: online advertisers and analytics firms will no longer be able to use our browser cookies to follow us around like bloodhounds as we wander from site to site, tracking and mapping our interests and behavior for whatever profit-motivated, privacy-wrecking purposes they might have. Safari 13.1 was released on Tuesday, bringing full cookie blocking and other updates to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) privacy feature. “The long wait is over,” Apple WebKit engineer John Wilander announced on Tuesday: the latest update to the Safari browser is blocking third-party cookies by default for all users.