Privacy is one of the aspects that is increasingly under attack, and luckily, that is increasingly worrying developers and users. Surfing the Internet safely is very complicated; There are always websites, cookies or caches that collect our data, or a simple identifier, and that are used to keep us under control and learn more and more about us. Therefore, every so often it is easy to find functions and features in the browsers that help us to be able to navigate with the greatest possible privacy. And one of the last is the partitioning of the cache that we will be able to enjoy from Chrome and Firefox.
When we talk about track and trace, the first thing that comes to mind is cookies. However, these are not the only ones used to track us . When we visit a website, other types of data are downloaded to our computer, such as HTTP data, images, favicons and fonts, among others, to which any website can access. Initially, the websites use these resources already downloaded to avoid having to download them again. However, there are many websites that use them to find out which websites the user has visited. And this is what you want to avoid with this new privacy measure.
How does it work
Instead of creating a single and universal cache for all websites, the partitioning of the HTTP cache is intended for each page to have its own independent cache. In this way, no website will be able to access the resources downloaded by other websites (for example, the sources, or the images) even though they are actually the same. Thus, we avoid that when visiting a website we can reveal what other websites we have visited before, improving our privacy.
The main problem with this feature is that some users may notice a loss of performance due to the fact that resources are no longer reused, but they must all be downloaded from each website. In any case, the impact is minimal, and if the websites we visit are not similar, we will not even notice that impact.
Availability
This feature is already available in Google Chrome since version 86 . Chrome is currently at version 87, so all users with an updated browser can enjoy this privacy improvement. In addition, it is activated by default for all users, so we will not have to do anything to make it work.
In the case of Firefox, this new function is already available in the beta version of the browser. To test it all users without using the development channel we will have to wait a month, until the launch of the final version of Firefox 85 . This version is scheduled, if all goes well, for January 26, 2021, and it should also be activated by default for all users.
Other browsers, such as Edge or Opera , will also include this feature very soon, since being part of the Chromium engine, they don’t have to do anything to include it, unless they don’t want to. And the same goes for the other Firefox-based browsers.
