Mozilla is increasingly positioning Firefox as the privacy champion among all the best browsers. The company recently introduced different tiers of tracking protection and no longer allows HTTP connections by default. Another thing its engineers are working on is called Total Cookie Protection (TCP). The protective layer is meant to make cross-site tracking even harder, and now, Firefox has announced that it’s rolling out TCP to all of its users by default on Windows and Macs.

TCP confines cookies to the sites on which they were created, stopping tracking companies from using this technology to track your movements across different websites. An infographic shared by Mozilla makes clear that this is achieved by separating cookie storage from site to site. In contrast to more aggressive solutions, Mozilla’s approach simply confines third-party cookies to individual websites rather than blocking them outright. Mozilla writes, “This approach strikes the balance between eliminating the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies – in particular the ability to track you – and allowing those cookies to fulfill their less invasive use cases (e.g. to provide accurate analytics).”

Mozilla initially introduced TCP as an optional feature back in 2021, when it was only turned on by default in incognito browsing. It has since gradually moved into more Mozilla products, including Firefox Focus. In fact, Mozilla writes that it has been working on TCP since 2015 with the release of Tracking Protection, its first privacy-centric feature that was limited to incognito mode. The company then really started to ramp up on the privacy front in 2018. That’s when it introduced options to limit and block trackers in Firefox, and it has only grown in this privacy-centric area ever since.

As for Total Cookie Protection on Android, a Mozilla spokesperson told us: "Total Cookie Protection has been on by default for Android users of the Firefox Focus app since January 2022. We are working on making it also available in Firefox for Android."