212778 - [P3P] Cookie notification icon is too persistent, and appears even when cookies not flagged

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: Cookies, enhancement)

Description

[Rod Spade]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

I have my Cookie Privacy Settings configured to accept all first-party cookies and reject all third-party cookies.  I often see the cookie notification icon in the status bar, presumably when a third-party cookie is rejected.  I don't want to know about cookies that are rejected - that's why I have them set to be rejected.  I would prefer to see the icon only if a cookie is "flagged".

Also the icon is then displayed in all browser windows, even in a new window that's opened to an empty page.  The notification should be only on the page that had the cookie.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  In Preference Cookies, select "Enable cookies based on privacy settings".
2.  View Privacy Settings.  Select custom.  Accept all First Party.  Reject all Third Party.
3.  Surf to http://www.movie-list.com/ 

Actual Results:  
Cookie notification icon displayed.

Expected Results:  
No icon.

Perhaps some people prefer the current behavior.  Maybe there should be a new option to disable the notification icon, or refine the scenarios in which it is displayed.

Regardless, if the icon is displayed, it should be only on the page with the cookie.  Currently, the notification icon is displayed in all browser windows and on all pages, until all browser windows are closed.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

per earlier discussion with mvl and dwitte, reassigning p3p bugs to
[e-mail] and adding helpwanted keyword.

Comment 2

[Prognathous]

Here's a formatted version of the original comment:
---------------------------------------------------

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.4)
Gecko/20030624 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-
US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

I have my Cookie Privacy Settings configured to accept all first-party
cookies and reject all third-party cookies.  I often see the cookie
notification icon in the status bar, presumably when a third-party
cookie is rejected.  I don't want to know about cookies that are
rejected - that's why I have them set to be rejected.  I would prefer to
see the icon only if a cookie is "flagged".

Also the icon is then displayed in all browser windows, even in a new
window that's opened to an empty page.  The notification should be only
on the page that had the cookie.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  In Preference Cookies, select "Enable cookies based on privacy
    settings".
2.  View Privacy Settings.  Select custom.  Accept all First Party.
    Reject all Third Party.
3.  Surf to http://www.movie-list.com/

Actual Results: Cookie notification icon displayed.

Expected Results: No icon.

Perhaps some people prefer the current behavior.  Maybe there should be
a new option to disable the notification icon, or refine the scenarios
in which it is displayed.

Regardless, if the icon is displayed, it should be only on the page with
the cookie.  Currently, the notification icon is displayed in all
browser windows and on all pages, until all browser windows are closed.

Comment 3

[Benoît]

I noticed this too, and it's very annoying. My cookie preferences are set as
follows:

-Accept all cookies
-Ask for each cookie

Yet I always get the icon when I deny cookies. Clicking on the icon and choosing
"Turn Off Privacy Settings" doesn't help, either.

I could reproduce the bug with the instructions.

Comment 4

[Benoît]

Can anyone please fix this little bug? At least I think it's little. It's part
of the security infrastructure, and I thought something like that should work
normally and is important.

At any rate, it's very annoying to me. I find aesthetic to be important, and
that cookie notification icon annoys me a lot!

Aargh!

Comment 5

[Benoît]

This bug has the potential to be even more serious:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=195287

Comment 6

[Prognathous]

[e-mail], you are not in a position to change blocking flags. Please
read http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html (especially section #2).

Thanks,

Prog.

Comment 7

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: don't turn on the cookie icon for rejected cookies (checked in)

partial fix, per description. this doesn't address the persistence and
window-ubiquity of the icon, which is still a problem :/

it also does a bit of cleanup (cookie-changed), and changes the icon
notifications so they're only done in the p3p case (since they're only p3p
related). this does mean that the mCookieIconIsVisible flag won't be updated if
p3p is turned off, but that sounds fine to me.

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

I've thought a little bit about the other changes requested in this bug, in case
someone wants to implement them. Currently, the p3p icon is impl'ed as a
statusbar overlay. It is not window-specific and does not turn off until clicked
on. See
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/cookie/resources/content/cookieTasksOverlay.xul

A more sane approach might be to give the icon a per-window state, and have it
only turn on for the duration a "flagged" site is loaded - i.e. loading a new
site would switch it off again. (Having per-window state would also allow us to
remove the horrible nsICookieService::GetCookieIconIsVisible method, ew!). We
could do this by providing a parent nsIDOMWindow pointer with all
cookie-{added,changed} notifications, so the js overlay code can then see if
that cookie notification was for its window. The nsIDOMWindow pointer is
obtainable from the nsIHttpChannel via the request callbacks. Toggling the icon
off when loading a new page is possible using nsIWebProgressListener and
nsIWebProgress. The latter provides an nsIDOMWindow attribute giving the window
the load event was for.

The above would also be handy if we ever wanted to implement a more general
cookie icon - one that wasn't p3p specific, and showed users whether any cookies
were rejected for the current page. Clicking on the icon might show a
context-sensitive menu that allowed the user to add the current page to the
cookie whitelist, for example. This would make a cookie policy of "default
reject, with per-site whitelist" feasible, since if a site refuses to work w/o
cookies the user can get graphical feedback and easily whitelist the site.

Comment 9

[Benoît]

Quote: "This would make a cookie policy of "default
reject, with per-site whitelist" feasible"

I already do this through these settings:
-Block all cookies
-Accept all cookies normally

Then, in my Cookie Manager, I have in my list the allowed sites. Works like a charm.

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Then, in my Cookie Manager, I have in my list the allowed sites. Works like a
charm.

Just like it was designed to :) What I had in mind was a more dynamic case,
though - where the user wants to whitelist sites as they surf, using a graphical
indicator that a cookie was blocked. Normal surfing isn't interrupted, yet it's
easy to enable cookies per-site when you need them. This may not be a very
common real-use case, I just thought it was worth mentioning.

Comment 11

[[e-mail]]

Ian, since you hack p3p, any comments here?

Comment 12

[Darin Fisher]

Comment on attachment 171229 [details] [diff] [review]
don't turn on the cookie icon for rejected cookies (checked in)

I'd really like to see us stablize (and possibly freeze) this observer API. 
I've seen some interest from people wanting to add cookie observation to
extensions.

r+sr=darin

Comment 13

[[e-mail]]

yeah, we could probably do that... this patch just removed some deprecated stuff
(which is marked as such in the idl), and it should be pretty clear to extension
authors how the API works.

checked in attachment 171229 [details] [diff] [review], but i'll leave this open in case someone wants to
do more.

Comment 14

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 15

[Benoît]

The bug itself has been fixed. Still, the flagging behavior doesn't seem to work
everytime it should. I guess that'll be another bug.

Just confirming for now and letting someone else resolve it.

Comment 16

[[e-mail]]

p3p has been permanently cvs removed, marking wontfix.