sakurina:

People accusing Apple of setting Safari’s default preferences to disable third-party cookies as a means of interfering with Google’s business are full of shit. The preference was decided on prior to there being any hard feelings whatsoever between Apple and Google.

There a ton of crazy bullshit conspiracy theories floating out there about how Safari’s settings are an attack on Google, an attack on the viability of ad-supported businesses on the Web, and how it’s all a play to give the iAd network an advantage against traditional Web ad networks.

Clearly, this has to be true even though a) the chronology doesn’t work out, b) most ad networks provide an opt-out feature that would effectively do the same as disabling third-party cookies to their business, and c) iAd is a dismal failure.

Here is my theory, which I can’t verify, but sounds totally plausible and Apple-like: Steve Jobs was a secretive person who didn’t particularly care for being tracked while he’s browsing the Web, and when Safari was being developed, he said third-party cookies should be off by default, and that is how it turned out.

I consider third party cookies being allowed by default in other browsers a bug.