Those Damnable 3rd Party Cookies

One of the new features of Firefox V3 is its ability to reject any 3rd party cookies that some Web sites may try to place on your computer. To be truthful, this feature is not new as it was in Firefox V1.5, but then was removed in Firefox V2. Now it is back and better than ever.

A third party cookie is one that comes from some party other than than the Web page you are currently visiting. As an example, you go to a Yahoo page, for instance, and Yahoo puts a cookie in your computer to help identify you when you return to their site. This can be very handy. But, on the Yahoo page is an ad for some company and it also tries to put a cookie on your page to help track your buying habits. This would be a third party cookie.

Much of the spyware and adware that shows up on your computer when you do a spyware scan come from third party cookies. The ability to reject these cookies is an important part of your safe browsing experience. It was great to see that the feature to reject these cookies is back in Firefox. The problem is that this feature is turned off when you install Firefox 3.0. To turn it on, you need to click on "Tools," then "Options." Then click on the "Privacy" icon and you will see the "Cookies" options. Just uncheck the "Accept third-party cookies" and you are protected. That's it.

Now, every once in a while, you may need to accept a third-party cookie. For instance, Firefox add-on's Foxmarks and Google Reader will not work unless you enable third party cookies. Here is how to handle this situation: In the above mentioned section on cookies, you will see a button titled "Exceptions." Click on that button then enter the Web address of the cookies you wish to accept. For instance, for Foxmarks, you would enter "Foxmarks.com". Then click on the "Accept" button and close the window. That's it.

I strongly recommend that if you are a Firefox user that you do this today. It will really cut down those adware and spyware cookies.