Comment by jokoon 4 days ago
I set firefox to clear cookies, also using cookies to "strict"
This somehow causes a huge pain to connect to mozilla's matrix instance, and I never understood why. This is a bit ironic since firefox has that feature to clear cookies.
I had to reset password, and do other weird things, I can't remember what exactly.
I hope this MAS thing fixes it.
Putting tracking protection to strict essentially makes Firefox violate certain web standards. Developers aren't going to test against that, and if they are they're probably not going to be able to do much about the problems strict tracking protection causes.
If MAS fixes this, it'll be by accident and it'll probably break in the future. Firefox warns against this kind of breakage if you enable strict tracking protection in the settings. You can't have strict tracking protection + websites doing cross-domain authentication working.
I mean, yeah, tracking prevention features basically completely break cross-domain authentication. There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth (or make the user experience a lot easier). While there are workarounds these days, sometimes it does require deep changes in how auth works
> There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth
I am not a web developer, but I would disagree with that.
Either web standards respect privacy or they don't, but I would not sacrifice privacy for anything.
Firefox was right to prevent tracking, it highlights how webstandards are just not good. I something doesn't work properly in a firefox private window, to me it should not exist.
It kind of depends. See Kagi Privacy Pass ("Allows you to use Kagi Search with Privacy Pass, which cryptographically ensures that Kagi cannot tie that request to an account and allows for further privacy and anonymity."): https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
If I'm authenticating with server A. I shouldn't have to carry ephemera from server B. A can interact with B on its own if necessary.
Bubbling up these architectural details to the front end is a symptom of the webdev cargo cult coming up with broken ideas that get fossilized as the status quo.
With OIDC, both occur: the client is redirected to the authentication server where they directly authenticate, then carries a token cross-domain back to the service. Finally, the service validates the token against the auth server.
The alternative would be something where I enter my Google username/password on random websites, and trust that they will forward it to Google and not do anything nefarious. This is less secure and less private.
If you don't trust your matrix client, why use it at all?
It's also a bit disheartening to see Matrix putting all that "Log in with Google", Apple, Facebook etc so prominently on their login page. The whole idea of decentralised services was getting out of those walled gardens.
Yeah, I would argue it's less about removing trust from the client (which will ultimately get an auth token in addition to secrets and plaintext messages) and more about allowing for centralized authentication and authorization policies.
How do you prevent them from collecting "Interaction Data"?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#bookmark-how-...
So unusable for people like me who only surf in private mode