Office 365 asking for permissions to change browser settings

Just in general, if any app or platform or website prompts you to allow them access to something out of the blue, and there's no obvious benefit or reason why you would need that, don't grant it. It is on them to adequately explain what it is they're asking for and why.

This "improve your experience" bullshit is Microsoft's default reason for letting them do anything. It means exactly nothing. Go to Microsoft to check documentation or ask them to explain thoroughly. Never take that line as an adequate explanation.

Hell, chances are, if you allowed that, you'd probably see another pop up in a couple days or so saying "Ya know, why not just use Edge? Think of how much more improved the experience could be."

A good 80% of the shit Microsoft notifies you about nowadays is either a disguised ad or some sort of campaign to pressure you into their ecosystem (effectively ads). If the thing is working, you can ignore most everything else.

Every once in a while I wonder what things are like back in the land of Microsoft. That this message doesn't give the user even the slightest hint about what it wants to do more specifically than "improve your experience" tells me all I need to know.

I believe this allows cross-domain cookie sharing for the current site, meaning office.com can use your cookies from microsoft.com for authentication/preferences/etc.

I know I'm going against the "fuck Microsoft" train of this community, but this is pretty innocuous

Use a new profile (firefox -p) and create a vanilla profile.

In your profile folder (~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxx-default-release/) you will have a prefs.js

Backup that prefs.js before, apply this office settings BS and backup the prefs.js after.

Using a tool like diff (KDE has a GUI frontent for it) you can see the differences between these files, please report them.

Just a wild guess: It could be related to the TrustedScriptURL api. I know O365 makes heavy use of it since I've seen errors come across the logs referencing it. Problem is, only Chromium browsers offer this API. Neither FF nor Safari implement it.

Dont know in this case (which is part of the problem indeed) but sometimes account access is to make the device itself "the second factor" which reduces nag-screens asking for codes or other 2fa time and again.

I ususally just get rid of those popups using custom uBO filters.

Probably just disable all privacy settings like block crosssite cookies or send do not track request etc.

Wow, they actually asked this time?

Makes bing your default search engine.