Ο Firefox 88 was released on Monday and among the changes the new version brings is a change in the way the Browser will handle the property window.name.
Previously, this property worked throughout the lifetime of a tab, meaning that as one user was transferred from one site to another, the value in the property persisted, and data from one site could be read by another.
“Tracking companies abuse this property to leakage information and have effectively turned it into a communication channel for transferring data between sites," says engineer Tim Huang, in a blog post.
"Even worse, malicious websites were able to monitor the content of window.name to collect personal data of users who had accidentally leaked it from another site."
With the new version, Firefox will delete the property when switching between sites, and when a user returns to a site, the window.name value will be restored.
"Together, these dual rules for clearing and restoring window.name data restrict this data to the site where it was originally created, just as Firefox Total Cookie Protection restricts cookies to the site where it was created," Huang said.
"This restriction is necessary to prevent leaks from malicious websites that used window.name to collect users' personal data."
