[LINK] ISPs consolidating - SPAM - Two Factor authencation

[David]

On Thursday, 14 August 2025 14:19:40 AEST Christian Heinrich wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Aug 2025 at 12:26, Marghanita da Cruz <marghanita at ramin.com.au> wrote:
> > Will have a look but currently trying to get Firefox to log me out (delete cookies) when I close browser. I had this setup before,  but the cookies seem to be persisting  across Browser sessions.
> 
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
> might be the root cause.

IMO the emerging Firefox Profile Manager has an interesting architectural justification which rests on Internet historical development.

The original browsers. such as NCSA's Mosaic, were essentially simple HTML interpreters.  To quote Wikipedia and with apologies to Linkers with long memories:  "Precursors to the web browser emerged in the form of hyperlinked applications during the mid and late 1980s, and following these, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee is credited with developing, in 1990, both the first web server, and the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb  [...]  The explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered in September 1993 by NCSA Mosaic, a graphical browser [...] aiming to bring multimedia content to non-technical users, and therefore included images and text on the same page, unlike previous browser designs."

In the intervening ~40 years business has exploited the potential of this technology but sometimes with little ethical consideration, to the point where individual privacy now seems to have become the driving force of browser development (and of the Internet more broadly).  Look at the current issies around proof of age for social-networking sites.

Firefox' Profile Manager is intended to contribute by stopping cross-site linking, which enables marketers to build a comprehensive picture of an individuals' financial situation, interests, the identity of their friends, their major purchases and others being considered, their browsing history, etc.  It does so by confining ALL data created by a given site to its own dedicated area, rather than by putting all cookies somewhere, all cached data somewhere else, and so on.  However it doesn't protect against someone with system privileges or malware such as root-kits, keyloggers, spyware, etc., or bugs in Firefox' own code of course.

It's easy to invoke the profile manager by entering <about:profiles> in the Firefox search bar, or by exiting Firefox and running <firefox -P> from a CLI prompt.

Well that's my understanding anyway, and sorry for the lecture...!

Cheers,
_DavidL._