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A comment on Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies.

Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by robmil on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:14PM (#5272053)
For those about to bemoan the breaking of things like Google Analytics: this patch only blocks third party cookies from domains that the user has never visited before. Since 99% of your visitors will have visited google.com, your Analytics should continue to function even after this update.
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by dangrossman on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:18PM (#5272063)
The GA script loads from google-analytics.com, not google.com.

    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by jsomethings on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:22PM (#5272074)
Safari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by magicalist on Sunday February 24, 2013 @04:21AM (#5273534)
that looks like they're talking about doubleclick, not google analytics. GA works by setting a first party cookie, so there's no need to work around anything. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

edit: oh, jonknee already mentioned that below.

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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by cpeterso on Saturday February 23, 2013 @08:04PM (#5272219)
Google can just change their analytics domain to google.com. Safari already uses this cookie policy.
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by jonknee on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:36PM (#5272128)
Except Google Analytics doesn't use third party cookies so it's a moot point.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by StavrosK on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:52PM (#5272179)
Does this mean that GA can't track users across websites?
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by Hovertruck on Saturday February 23, 2013 @08:03PM (#5272215)
They could theoretically do both by having the JS on the page set one cookie on the host domain and having the server response set one on the GA domain. I don't believe they do, however.

Shameless self mention: Chartbeat does not do this either.

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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by StavrosK on Saturday February 23, 2013 @08:05PM (#5272222)
Wouldn't that count as a third-party cookie? It depends on whether "third party" is defined as "third party from the server response" or "third party from the domain of the loaded page".
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by pommefrites on Sunday February 24, 2013 @08:32AM (#5274116)
Google provides a way to do it: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by burke on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:26PM (#5272088)
That's still a piss-poor heuristic to rely on -- especially because it biases your analytics data toward google-users.
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Re:Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies by ihsw on Saturday February 23, 2013 @07:52PM (#5272180)
It isn't isolated to Google users, it gives control of tracking back to websites that users actually go to.
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