Third party

This was originally published on my own site, which is awesome.

The web turned 30 this year. When I was back at CERN to mark this anniversary, there was a lot of introspection and questioning the direction that the web has taken. Everyone I know that uses the web is in agreement that tracking and surveillance are out of control. It seems only right to question whether the web has lost its way.

But here’s the thing: the technologies that enable tracking and surveillance didn’t exist in the early years of the web—JavaScript and cookies.

Without cookies, the web was stateless. This was by design. Now, I totally understand why cookies—or something like cookies—were needed. Without some way of keeping track of state, there’s no good way for a website to “remember” what’s in your shopping cart, or whether you’ve authenticated yourself.

But why would cookies ever need to work across domains? Authentication, shopping carts and all that good stuff can happen on the same domain. Third-party cookies, on the other hand, seem custom made for tracking and frankly, not much else.

Browsers allow you to disable third-party cookies, though it’s not yet the default. If enough people do it—and complain about the sites that stop working when third-party cookies are disabled—then maybe it can become the default.

Firefox is taking steps in this direction, automatically disabling some third-party cookies—the ones that known trackers. Safari is also taking steps to prevent cross-site tracking. It’s not too late to change the tide of third-party cookies.

Then there’s third-party JavaScript.

In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that third-party JavaScript is even possible. I mean, putting arbitrary code—that can then inject even more arbitrary code—onto your website? That seems like a security nightmare!

I imagine if JavaScript were being specced today, it would almost certainly be restricted to the same origin by default. But I guess the precedent had been set with images and style sheets: they could be embedded regardless of whether their domain names matched yours. Still, this is executable code we’re talking about here: that’s quite a footgun that the web has given site owners. And boy, oh boy, has it been used by the worst people to do the most damage.

Again, as with cookies, if we were to imagine what the web would be like if JavaScript was restricted by a same-domain policy, there are certainly things that would be trickier to do.

• Embedding video, audio, and maps would get a lot finickier.
• Analytics would need to be self-hosted. I don’t think that would bother any site owners. An analytics platform like Google Analytics that tracks people across domains is doing it for its own benefit rather than that of site owners.
• Advertising wouldn’t be creepy and annoying. Instead of what’s so euphemistically called “personalisation”, advertisers would have to rely on serving relevant ads based on the content of the site rather than an invasive psychological profile of the user. (I honestly think that advertisers would benefit from this kind of targetting.)

It’s harder to imagine putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to third-party JavaScript than it is with third-party cookies. All the same, I wish that browsers made it easier to experiment with it. Just as I can choose to accept all cookies, reject all cookies, or only accept same-origin cookies, I wish I could accept all JavaScript, reject all JavaScript, or only accept same-origin JavaScript.

As it is, browsers are making it harder and harder to exercise any control over JavaScript at all. So we reach for third-party tools. We don’t call them JavaScript managers though. We call them ad blockers. But honestly, most of the ad-blocker users I know—myself included—are not bothered by the advertising; we’re bothered by the tracking. We should really call them surveillance blockers.

If third-party JavaScript weren’t the norm, not only would it make the web more secure, it would make it way more performant. Read the chapter on third parties in this year’s newly-released Web Almanac. The figures are staggering.

93% of pages include at least one third-party resource, 76% of pages issue a request to an analytics domain, the median page requests content from at least 9 unique third-party domains that represent 35% of their total network activity, and the most active 10% of pages issue a whopping 175 third-party requests or more.

I don’t think all the web’s performance ills are due to third-party scripts; developers are doing a bang-up job of making their sites big and bloated with their own self-hosted frameworks and code. But as long as third-party JavaScript is allowed onto a site, there’s a limit to how much good developers can do to improve the performance of their sites.

I go to performance-related conferences and you know who I’ve never seen at those events? The people who write the JavaScript for third-party tracking scripts. Those developers are wielding an outsized influence on the health of the web.

I’m very happy to see the work being done by Mozilla and Apple to normalise the idea of rejecting third-party cookies. I’d love to see the rejection of third-party JavaScript normalised in the same way. I know that it would make my life as a developer harder. But that’s of lesser importance. It would be better for the web.

This was originally published on my own site, which is awesome.