I am a little paranoid which is an unfortunate side-effect of my profession. And due to this side-effect I always keep my third-party cookies switched off. I also use Firefox most of the time, unless it is required to do otherwise. I have been using it since version 0.75 and it is a bit like till death do us part. And this is how I ran into a very funny problem about a year ago: Google began to ask for third party cookies in order to allow you to download the content.
My guess is Google decided to switch from client-side trackers to server-side trackers sometime during summer 2021. They have already been tracking users by means of a fingerprint, and a fingerprint was (and is) built around user's device data, such as network data, payment data like cards (a card number carries information about the bank it was issued by), unique configuration of your device, user activity patterns, etc, etc. Well, they do own about 3/4 of the mobile market, don't they? And they do that without giving the end user the root access to the system.
This new policy forced me to rethink configuration of my browsers to keep my archives up-to-date. So, I configured Chrome to allow drive.google.com to always use cookies including third-party ones, but I decided to keep using Firefox with the strict security profile. Downloading data from the drive with Firefox became broken for good. Or so I thought.
Because sometime during 2022 (I don't remember exactly, but I think it was in the beginning of the year) I accidentally used Firefox to download my data and it worked. And I was very happy about that. Until I accidentally used Opera to download my data, and it failed with the familiar message:
Why does Firefox work with Google.Drive and Opera doesn't, although they are both supposed to have the strictest configurations possible. And these configurations are similar as configurations of two different browsers can get. After all, we already know about the DuckDuckGo gate [1]. Is it an isolated case, or is it a common practice now? I am really not ready for a divorce right now.
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[1] DuckDuckGo gate:
https://thenextweb.com/news/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-sparks-backlash
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