Firefox, cookies, domains and exceptions

[muriel_volestrangler]

I'm using Firefox v.2.something, and I was looking through my cookies, and happened to notice that some site had set cookies for the domain ".co.uk". Now, since I'm British, I visit a lot of sites like that, and I don't want something tracking me between several of them, so I've deleted those, and set Firefox to say "always reject cookies from '.co.uk'" in the Cookies Exceptions list. But I can't actually tell from the help, or from a quick Google, if that exception is also going to block cookies from, say. ".bbc.co.uk" .

Anyone know? If it will, anyone know if Firefox 3 will do this better?

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. And from experience, I've now found out it blocks other '.co.uk' cookies

so that I can't stay signed in at a 'blahblahblah.co.uk' forum, even though they don't store their cookies under just '.co.uk'. Bummer.

But the good news is I've found that Firefox 3 does fix this:

Firefox 3 includes a feature called the Effective TLD Service, which examines host names to figure out the effective top-level domain, or the part under which domain names can be registered by the public (examples include .com, .co.uk and .pvt.k12.wy.us). This allows for cookies to be better secured (by, for example, preventing a site from setting a cookie under .co.uk, which could then be read by any .co.uk site) and can also allow for better sorting of history by site. There's no algorithm for determining the effective TLD, so a list has been compiled and made available at publicsuffix.org.

http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article23974.html

so it looks like upgrade time for me.