Whitelist vs blacklist
Posted on August 05, 2003 @ 10:59 in Software
It appears as if more and more discerning websurfers who previously preferred Opera are switching to Mozilla Firebird. Firebird has a lot going for it, but there is one area where Opera beats it hands down: cookie handling.
The dilemma with cookies is that in general they're useless and omnipresent, but there are certain sites, like your online banking website or forums that you are involved with, that you would like to be able to set cookies in order to remember your login details. Opera handles this brilliantly with a whitelist approach, that allows you to tell Opera which websites you want to allow to set cookies. Firebird on the other hand, uses a blacklist approach, where you have to tell Firebird for each and every website whether or not it is allowed to set cookies.
This means that with Opera I spend 3 minutes during setup to specify which websites CAN set cookies and unless I want to add a website to that list, all other cookies are automatically refused after that. With Firebird however, if I want to to be able to use cookies on certain websites, I have to enable the use of cookies for ALL websites, and for every new website that wants to set a cookie I have to specify whether I want to accept cookies from that website or not. This means that when surfing with Firebird I'm clicking the "Deny cookie" button many times an hour, sometimes many times a minute.
I think there's no other way of putting it, but to say that this is a fundamental flaw in Firebird. It is not a user-centric solution and it seriously hampers the workflow. Even the latest Internet Explorers work with a whitelist approach to cookies... (Very meaningful trailing dots there.) I hope this gets fixed in the next builds.
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I can never switch off of Opera because I've gotten too used to useing the "mouse gestures" to navigate links. Once you get used to them, they really are faster than other methods of surfing around.
Posted by Ampersand on August 05, 2003 @ 21:00
Ah, well, personally I don't care much for mouse gestures, but the beauty of the Firebird Extension system is that people can and do write a whole lot of extensions, like for instance the Mouse Gestures Extension. Give it a try:
http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html#Mouse%20Gestures
Posted by Frank on August 05, 2003 @ 22:26
I agree that whitelisting (as Firebird does with it's pop-up blocking) is the best way to go with cookie handling - there's a bugzilla entry for this though:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75915
...so I suppose it's worth adding your vote to it. Personally, I don't really care that much about cookie handling that I would be put off a browser depending on it's implementation of it, but if you're going to do the thing, you may as well do it right. However, I think you're just giving yourself more bother with the "ask for every cookie" setting - I find that just using "for the originating website only" will kill most ad cookies, while I don't really care about the rest that much.
I don't know exactly why, but Mouse Gestures is also something I've never really taken to either, having tried it on Opera and Firebird, via extension.
Posted by insin on August 06, 2003 @ 11:40
Thanks for the link insin :-) I'll cast my vote when I'm home, where I can check what my Bugzilla username/password is.
And don't forget the milk on your way home.
Posted by Frank on August 06, 2003 @ 11:50
Ah, the milk is a carefully orchestrated blocker task ;-)
Posted by insin on August 06, 2003 @ 14:34
Important update: Cookie whitelisting has now been added to Mozilla Firebird. The first Firebird release with this feature is 0.7.
Posted by Anonymous Donor on October 16, 2003 @ 18:34
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