Live data from Hacker News

Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

lapcatsoftware.com

331–340 of 372 posts

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

#331
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's an operation that still need their bills paid. It's created and run by the guy that created firefox and javascript, I'd rather trust him than a publicly traded advertising company that generates 80% of its revenue by harvesting user data and influencing search results.

There is no denying he is innovative, but his morals or principles are not very pure. There is a reason why he left Mozilla and why some actions of Brave are quite questionable.

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

#332
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't the point that you want to detect what the foreign code does? So your solution would require inject your code into the code that wants to hide from you ... ?

I think the idea is you patch the console to display the objects without calling their toString methods.

I don't think that works

I might be off here, but I imagine console.log early exits if there's no console open, so it doesn't call toString

If that's the case you can just write to the console in a loop and immediately know if one is open

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

#333
post #238
post #229

Anyone here ever wanted a UI outside of the Devtools for deleting individual keys out of a site’s localStorage? No? Didn’t think so. If this individual-cookies-manager settings page didn’t already exist, would you think it worth it to introduce one? More worth it than an individual-localStorage-keys-manager (which clearly nobody is scrabbling for)? If so, why?

Ummm loads of time I end up in weird redirect loops that I solve by deleting cookies one-by-one. When dealing with cookies I don’t want to just wipe all of them! Sometimes I just want to deal with some of them. Not as a developer but as a user of the SSO multidomain 20-redirect hellscape

Maybe you didn't understand the rhetorical intent of my question. Let me restate.

There are just as many weird problems with websites that cannot currently be fixed in this "pick and choose" manner, because the corrupted state is a single key in the site's localStorage. Instead, the current solution is "blow away the site's localStorage as a whole." (And, in fact, it's usually even less granular than this; you'd usually hit "clear Storage" in the Devtools, blowing away localStorage, AppCache, and a number of other things, all at once.)

Sites' localStorage is thought of as a kind of opaque per-site database—not something to be picked through by users, but rather something that's either in a valid state, or in a corrupt state where it should be purged.

And, as far as I know, that paradigm has been working just fine for everyone! Nobody knows enough about a site they didn't develop themselves to make a change to a single key in a site's localStorage that will take it from a corrupt state to a valid state. The average user—even the average developer—is only likely to corrupt the state further, by making changes roughly at random. We all just "purge localStorage" as one of the "the site is doing weird shit" debugging steps, and never ask for a finer scalpel than that—because that fine scalpel would essentially be akin to picking through the site's memory one raw address-value pair at a time. There'd be no context. It'd be useless, unless-and-until you went through a laborious brute-forcing process.

It's great that you've figured out how to delete particular individual cookies for a site, but you must realize that you learned what worked in each case by brute-force trial and error, in ways that likely corrupted the site's state innumerable times before you created a new valid state. That what you were doing was essentially akin to creating a Game Genie code for the website, poking and prodding at its (opaque!) memory in the hopes that you'll get a useful result, rather than a program crash.

And the argument being put forward in this comments section, is that the mindset required to create a Game Genie code or something like it, automatically implies that the right "home" for said process is the Devtools UX anyway. The Devtools UX gives you the tools needed for iteration and experimentation (a REPL; a live view of the site as you poke at it; etc); while the Settings UX is for knobs and switches where you know what button you want to press from the start, and just need an efficient navigation hierarchy that will let you find it and press it.

By deleting individual cookies within a site's cookie jar, you're debugging that site—poking and prodding at it iteratively—whether you call it that or not. So why expose a secondary, non-iterative interface for doing so? You'd just be encouraging people to do an inherently-iterative process more painfully by using a non-iterative interface.

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

#334
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not even close.

Why not, It's in Firefox, I'm literally looking at it right now.

No it isn't. Some parts of Servo were adopted into Firefox, but "Servo" is not in Firefox.

If you compile servo and point it at the homepage of google, I doubt it renders right now. It was constantly broken even when it had a full-time staff.

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

#335

> By the way, before anyone runs off and yells "Switch to Safari" or something like that, keep in mind that Safari is actually in a worse state and doesn't have detailed cookie and site information at all. It does, but it's split between two places. You can see a list of all sites that have stored data in Preferences > Privacy > Manage Website Data... (no option to view here, just delete). You can also navigate to th…

Safari is also generally trending in the right way, while Chrome is headed in the wrong way.

Why so?

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

#336
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also run the only decent, independent search engine that has _its own_, _uncensored_ index. DDG was perceptibly worse than Google, but Brave Search is about on par, and the latency seems to be better as well. I maybe have to go to Google once or twice a month now instead of several times a day DDG would require. I know a bit about Google search, and frankly I'm stunned by what Brave was able to pull off here. I'…

> I'm actually not against Firefox either, but they refuse to implement a profile switcher https://davemartorana.com/multifirefox/

Isn't the containers does the same job? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the mac nature?

It's either an internally consistent UX or matching belt and shoes, depending on who you ask.

Or cafe-oriented hipster douchebaggery, depending on whom you ask.

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

#338
post #52

Firefox Nightly is a pretty good browser imho Also it just so happens that there are extensions that allow you detailed (read: raw and editable) cookie data for each website you visit!

I use & love Firefox, too, but do note that the author's criticism directly applies to it, too: AFAIK, FF will not show you the individualized cookies, or all you to act on them individually. Now, as you say, you can download an extension (and indeed, I do!), but I think there is some merit to it being in the base app. (E.g., not having to trust an extension. But also, it's part of Firefox 's data, and FF should prov…

For what it's worth, Firefox's official abbreviation is Fx, not FF.

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

#339
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also run the only decent, independent search engine that has _its own_, _uncensored_ index. DDG was perceptibly worse than Google, but Brave Search is about on par, and the latency seems to be better as well. I maybe have to go to Google once or twice a month now instead of several times a day DDG would require. I know a bit about Google search, and frankly I'm stunned by what Brave was able to pull off here. I'…

These days Google just takes you to the site with the most ads. The quality of the search results has nosedived in the last ten years.

And they took away the ability to block specific sites from search results, so you're forced to wade through all the search-term-harvesting spam sites. The best example is the ones that simply republish StackOverflow content. Screen upon screen of them.

Oh yeah, and Google got rid of the "+" sign that used to let you require the presence of a word in results, allegedly because of their "Google Plus" crap. Now that that's dead and gone, did they restore the "+" operator? Nope. Now you have to discover (and bother with) the "allintext:" prefix.

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

#340
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for Chrome so not sure what this article is about.

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.

I think they prepare for cookieless in favor of FLoC.
Post reply on HN