1596972 - What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?

Status: NEW

(Core :: Privacy: Anti-Tracking, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Emma Humphries ☕️🎸🧞‍♀️✨ (she/they) [:emceeaich] (Pacific Time) use needinfo]

Recently, Jeremy Keith commented that most of 3rd party JavaScript is of the intrusive, tracking nature, similar to 3rd party cookies.

What would be the collateral harm to the non-commercial, non-advertising-driven web that used 3rd party JavaScripts for libraries such as JQuery, React, etc.?

I'm suggesting this as an experiment we could try in Nightly to see how much breaks and what sort of interventions would be needed (such as whitelisting some 3rd party domains, such as CDNs for script libraries) if we made this a more broadly available option.

Comment 1

[Steven Englehardt [:englehardt]]

Thanks for the suggestion! When we tried to block all third party cookies (rather than just cookies for trackers, as we do in ETP Standard) we found that the breakage was too high to ship: https://mozilla.report/post/projects/cookie_restrictions.kp/.

I suspect we'd see the same if we tried to do this style of blocking for all third-party Javascript. We can revisit this in the future when we've tackled more of the low hanging fruit.