Why does Firefox treat 3rd party cookies from Google differently?

Question

I run Firefox with "strict" selected in the "enhanced tracking protection" section of the Firefox settings. To my knowledge, this section is meant to prevent known tracking domains from setting cross-site tracking cookies(among other things). This catches well known 3rd party tracking cookies mostly every time when visiting various websites(e.g. websites with Stripe payment integration, adtech cookies, etc).However, whenever I do a Google search and click on the link I want, 3rd party cookies from Google are default-allowed through my Firefox enhanced tracking protection, despite being the de-facto tracking cookie on the internet. I was wondering if anyone knew the reason for this?

solardev · Accepted Answer

If you're doing a Google search, wouldn't a Google cookie be first party...?Do you have a specific example you could share?

shortrounddev2 · Answer

A third party cookie is a cookie that has been set across different domains. I.e: you are on foo.com, and a javascript request to bar.com sets a cookie on the bar.com domain.A first party cookie is set on the same domain. I.e: you are on foo.com, and the page responds with a cookie for foo.com

readyplayernull · Answer

Google paid Firefox plenty of money.

Why does Firefox treat 3rd party cookies from Google differently?

If you're doing a Google search, wouldn't a Google cookie be first party...?
Do you have a specific example you could share?

A third party cookie is a cookie that has been set across different domains. I.e: you are on foo.com, and a javascript request to bar.com sets a cookie on the bar.com domain.
A first party cookie is set on the same domain. I.e: you are on foo.com, and the page responds with a cookie for foo.com

Google paid Firefox plenty of money.