I heard around the internet that Firefox on Android does not have Site Isolation built-in yet. After a little bit of research, I learned that Site Isolation on Android was added in Firefox Nightly, appearing to have been added sometime in June 2023. What I can’t find, though, is whether this has ever been added to any stable versions of Firefox yet. Does anyone know anything about this?
Update: After further research, it appears that Site Isolation is not currently a feature in stable version of Firefox on Android. I don’t know with certainty if their information is up-to-date, but GrapheneOS (A well-known privacy/security-focused fork of Android) does not recommend using Firefox-based browsers on Android due to it’s (apparently) lack of a Site Isolation feature. A snippet of what Graphene currently have to say about Firefox on Android/GrapheneOS from their usage guide page, is: “Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface.”
On a side-note, they also say about Firefox’s current Site Isolation on desktop being weaker, which I wasn’t aware of. “Even in the desktop version, Firefox’s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.”
Well I’m not an expert and I don’t feel like digging up all the specifics but the concerns generally are cookies. The person who replied here made it sound like Mozilla is letting websites steal your credit card number from open tabs or something
alright i see, that does make more sense but they can still ID with you a cookie on all your concurrent sessions?
i guess this aint a security risk per see but wtf… why they even need cross site cookies if they can do this.
Cross site cookies specifically are the concern here. Other cookies cannot be read arbitrarily
i see, i thought they are turn off now by default? or at least there is a setting to block hem.
I’m not certain. The “strict” privacy setting in FF probably does block them. Not sure if it’s default or not.
On FF on my android phone, I just checked and “strict” privacy mode is not on so I guess by default cross site cookies may be enabled. Thanks for asking these questions – I’m setting that to Strict now.
You did all the work…
I do keep mine on strict tho
I don’t see why it is not set by default tbh prolly breaks some bullshot websites
Yeah. Probably due to the fact that people will ignorantly declare firefox broken if they experience something like that. I don’t think the standard setting is terrible for privacy either, btw, just a bit more permissive than “strict”