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Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

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Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#171

Post by tyingq »

renewiltord wrote: post #143
tyingq wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's changed, but walking a customer through clearing some specific cookies was a common help desk thing. To deal with shitty websites...PayPal had this problem for a long time where you would get an obscure error until you manually cleared a cookie. This will be harder, especially where you need to clear cookies on different domains like a login page, saml page, account page, etc.

You had to clear one cookie on Paypal and leave the rest? Jesus Christ, what a nightmare! Do you happen to recall what situation that was? Just curious to read in a Daily WTF sense, not challenging you to prove it.

You could clear "all cookies for all sites", but that tends to piss customers off, as pre-filled fields for many websites are no longer pre-filled.

If I remember right, clearing it for one site didn't help because clearing "login.paypal.com" cookies didn't clear "some-other-thing.paypal.com" or "www.paypal.com". They seem to use www.paypal.com for everything now.

Google for: "paypal Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand" for one example

Or "paypal your last action could not be completed" for another.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#172

Post by Akronymus »

canada_dry wrote: post #131
crazygringo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. All the functionality is already built into Chrome right here: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/storage/cookies/ Contrary to the headline, Chrome isn't removing the ability to do anything -- they're just removing it from the preferences interface, where I'm not sure it really ever made sense to include in the first place. Truly, editing/deleting individual cookies isn't something any regular u…

> deleting individual cookies isn't something any regular user ever needs to do I disagree. A problem just recently with a gov site req'd you delete their cookies to resolve it (as an interim solution until they get around some year to fix the issue).

Or also twitter, where it is unusable without logging in/blocking cookies (Which you can do from the preferences)

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#173

Post by KingMachiavelli »

yccs27 wrote: post #150
renewiltord wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so clear all the cookies for the gov site. Previously you could do that and now you can do that. Nothing has changed for this use case.

Settings vs dev tools does make a huge difference imo. The settings pane gives you a cleaner ui for quick changes (debatable, but I certainly feel this way). Dev tools can break your browser if you do things wrong. They are made for development and deep changes, not routine stuff. That is not "nothing has changed".

You can still clear cookies for a single site by clearing all data for the site. Does not require devtools. If a site is bad enough to require clearing cookies, clearing the cache & stored data is probably not a bad idea.

If your site needs users to clear cookies, then you should fix your site. Clearing cookies is not a routine thing.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#174

Post by zmmmmm »

intricatedetail wrote: post #160
zmmmmm wrote: post #146

We're getting into the scary space now where it's becoming feasible for sites to insist on Chrome and drop support for other browsers. I've hit two such apps in the last month where not only did the app not work on FireFox, but the experience was completely broken (blank page, etc). So they aren't even bothering with enough testing to put up a "please use chrome" message. I use FireFox for everything personal and Chr…

I worked on a project that a company decided to be Chrome only. This was during times when IE was still popular. We were spending a lot of time on cross browser compatibility and at one point the start-up didn't have money to spend on that. We picked Chrome as at the time offered best performance and it was fairly easy to make the app look as intended. We had to help some customers install Chrome and after that we ha…

This is the slippery slope we're on. You only have to get a little bit down the pathway of the dominant browser departing from standards and the cost of maintaining cross compatibility goes up exponentially. Your experience is absolutely real and it's actually the reason why we have to be vigilant not to get in that state in the first place.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#175

Post by Matthias1 »

yccs27 wrote: post #150
renewiltord wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so clear all the cookies for the gov site. Previously you could do that and now you can do that. Nothing has changed for this use case.

Settings vs dev tools does make a huge difference imo. The settings pane gives you a cleaner ui for quick changes (debatable, but I certainly feel this way). Dev tools can break your browser if you do things wrong. They are made for development and deep changes, not routine stuff. That is not "nothing has changed".

You can still clear all cookies for a given site from within preferences.

They're removing the listing of individual cookies for each site. So you can still remove all cookies from, e.g. Hacker News, but will no longer be able to see the individual names of the cookies, e.g. `ph_6CDb7STpzm64A_...`.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#176

Post by drran »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #99
kelnos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo was never supposed to be a browser. It was a testbed for new browser tech/components, some of which got ported into Firefox. I had hopes that Servo would also be an embeddable browser engine, but not sure if that was ever a serious goal. Servo still exists and has been spun out of Mozilla's org ( https://github.com/servo/servo/ ). Certainly development will be slower without a dedicated, paid team behind it, bu…

I give Firefox browser engine 5 years top before Mozilla becomes Chromium based. Servo WAS meant to be the future had Mozilla continued to fund its development, there is no way around that fact. Yes, it was experimental, but so where every other browser engines/forks when they started. Mozilla lost a lot of goodwill when they fired Servo team and most of the Rust developers.

Why we need two Chrome's?

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#177

Post by renewiltord »

tyingq wrote: post #171
renewiltord wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had to clear one cookie on Paypal and leave the rest? Jesus Christ, what a nightmare! Do you happen to recall what situation that was? Just curious to read in a Daily WTF sense, not challenging you to prove it.

You could clear "all cookies for all sites", but that tends to piss customers off, as pre-filled fields for many websites are no longer pre-filled. If I remember right, clearing it for one site didn't help because clearing "login.paypal.com" cookies didn't clear "some-other-thing.paypal.com" or "www.paypal.com". They seem to use www.paypal.com for everything now. Google for: "paypal Your browser sent a request that t…

I googled for those and it's funny but sadly not as entertaining as I'd hoped. All the responses involve clearing all cookies for paypal.com at al.

> If I remember right, clearing it for one site didn't help because clearing "login.paypal.com" cookies didn't clear "some-other-thing.paypal.com" or "www.paypal.com". They seem to use www.paypal.com for everything now.

Right, but that's not a problem that this particular change is going to do anything about. Previously, you had to find all the different paypal domains and whack their cookies and now you have to do the same. The functionality you can't do in the Preferences window now (but you can in DevTools) is find a single cookie in a single site and whack that one. That's the one that would be Daily WTFy.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#178

Post by IIsi50MHz »

shock-value wrote: post #111
DangitBobby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is quite clear. The question is, why did they go backwards on functionality. They took a simple user interface and removed a single useful feature from it, and what remains is a much more tedious way to do the same thing. Why? What was the benefit? The author speculates that it's to make user cookie control more difficult.

The reason was probably that no one ever needs to delete just a subset of cookies from a site. I certainly never have, and I'm a pretty technically-minded user. (Other than for development, in which case I'm using dev tools anyway.)

Counterpoint: I've many times had to fix presentation of or access to a site by purging just specific cookies. Two sites that have previously had these problems are RingCentral's web interface and AutoTask. Maybe a dozen or more others, but admittedly not many…however, when I've needed it, the problem has been persistent, requiring multiple fixes per day, over a few consecutive days or or even a couple weeks.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#179

Post by SquareWheel »

qutreM wrote: post #159
SquareWheel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser dev tools are more powerful now than ever before, and they're only a single key press away.

Dev tools are next... same argument... not many people use them.

You can't have consumers without producers. Dev tools are an integral tool to building websites and webapps today. They're still receiving considerable investment from browser vendors. I see new features in almost every release.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#180

Post by nicce »

travoc wrote: post #60
NVHacker wrote: post #50

Anyone still uses Chrome for personal stuff ?

No, my household has shifted everything to Brave or Safari with AdGuard.

Brave is also developed by yet another ad based company, and is also Chromium based.

I’m not so sure if grass is greener on this site, as the money always decides in the end.

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