in return for the bad-stuff blocking. Keeping the Safe Browsing Service Running Smoothly Google hosts the Safe Browsing service on the same infrastructure as many of their other services, and they need to ensure that our users aren't blocked from accessing the malware and phishing blacklists as well as make sure they invest in the right resources to keep the service operating well.  One of the mechanisms they need for performing this quality-of-service assurance is a cookie, so the first request Firefox makes to the Safe Browsing API results in the setting of a Google cookie. I know that not everyone likes that cookie, but Google needs it to make sure their service is working well so I've been working with them to ensure that they can use it for quality of service metrics but not track you around the web.  The most straightforward way to do this is to split the Firefox cookie jar into two: one for the web and one for the Safe Browsing feature.  It's not there yet, but with a little engineering work, in a future version of Firefox that cookie will only be used for Safe Browsing, and not sent with every request to Google as you browse the web. While Firefox has been using Safe Browsing for a while, Google has started experimenting with a couple new features in Safe Browsing for additional malware and phishing filtering.  Both of these new features are pretty new and it's not yet clear how effective they