387254 - remove all cookies I did not explicitly set

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Tom Schneider]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070509 SeaMonkey/1.1.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070509 SeaMonkey/1.1.2

To clear problems one is often advised to remove cookies.
Upon doing this one then discovers that many web sites cannot
be accessed properly.  Another option, to remove only cookies
I have not explicitly set myself, would make it easy to get
rid of the junk.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click on Tools
2. Click on Cookie Manager
3. Click on Manage Stored cookies
Actual Results:  
Options available:
Remove Cookie
Remove all Cookies

Expected Results:  
Another option would be:

Remove cookies I have not set myself.


The new option would allow one to clear away all the junk that builds up
in the cookies cache, yet protect the ones the user really wanted.

It would help to have a data column showing these.
(The date of the cookie expiration and all other cookie
information on the table would also help the user!)

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

This is pretty much what "make all cookies session cookies" does. It ignores entries on your Exceptions List (so that you can specify sites that are allowed to set cookie lifetimes) and discards all cookies except whitelisted cookies at the end of each browser session. The best part is that it's entirely automatic.

Frankly, I don't think it would be worth adding another button to Seamonkey's prefs to do this, but then again, I'm not a Seamonkey dev, and they've made some wildly illogical UI decisions before ;)

Comment 2

[Tom Schneider]

I could not locate controls for "make all cookies session cookies".  I have set
'Accept cookies for 2 days' but apparently that doesn't work and cookies
going back to last year are in there unless I delete them by hand.
(There should be dates on the Cookie sites.  There should be the ability
to switch sites by hand on the list rather than just remove the site.)

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I'm not sure where the pref lives in Seamonkey, but in about:config it's network.cookie.lifetimePolicy set to 2.

Comment 4

[zug_treno]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I could not locate controls for "make all cookies session cookies".  

Maybe it will be added to the preferences by bug 278221?

> (There should be dates on the Cookie sites. <..> )
 
Duplicate of bug 162914?

Comment 5

[Jens Hatlak (:InvisibleSmiley)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> To clear problems one is often advised to remove cookies.
> Upon doing this one then discovers that many web sites cannot
> be accessed properly.  Another option, to remove only cookies
> I have not explicitly set myself, would make it easy to get
> rid of the junk.

I guess with "explicitly set myself" you refer to the mode where you're asked whether you want SeaMonkey to set a cookie or not, right? As far as I know that choice is not saved, i.e. once the cookie has been set SeaMonkey doesn't know that you explicitly set it anymore, it's just like any other cookie that was set (fellow developers, correct me if I'm wrong). So if I'm right and I understand you correctly then what you want can hardly be implemented.

Please check if this request still makes sense in light of the changes made in SeaMonkey 2.0 (see below) and whether you can be more specific about what you'd like to be implemented. Meanwhile I'll move this to UI Design.

> (The date of the cookie expiration and all other cookie
> information on the table would also help the user!)

With SM 2.0 the expiration date can be added through the column chooser (icon to the right of the column headers). Also columns can be sorted, cookies can be searched and actions (delete) applied to only the selection, even in search mode. Does that ease your task?

Comment 6

[Tom Schneider]

(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #0)
> > To clear problems one is often advised to remove cookies.
> > Upon doing this one then discovers that many web sites cannot
> > be accessed properly.  Another option, to remove only cookies
> > I have not explicitly set myself, would make it easy to get
> > rid of the junk.
> 
> I guess with "explicitly set myself" you refer to the mode where you're asked
> whether you want SeaMonkey to set a cookie or not, right? As far as I know that
> choice is not saved, i.e. once the cookie has been set SeaMonkey doesn't know
> that you explicitly set it anymore, it's just like any other cookie that was
> set (fellow developers, correct me if I'm wrong). So if I'm right and I
> understand you correctly then what you want can hardly be implemented.

It requires one more bit of information to keep track of when I said that a site is allowed to set cookies.  I want to be able to wipe out all cookies EXCEPT for those of sites which I allow.  This way I don't have to spend 5 hours
going through the long list of cookies random sites have set in my machine
(essentially their garbage).

> Please check if this request still makes sense in light of the changes made in
> SeaMonkey 2.0 (see below) and whether you can be more specific about what you'd
> like to be implemented. Meanwhile I'll move this to UI Design.

Thanks!

> > (The date of the cookie expiration and all other cookie
> > information on the table would also help the user!)
> 
> With SM 2.0 the expiration date can be added through the column chooser (icon
> to the right of the column headers).

I'm using 2.0.4 (the latest) and in the Cookie Manager there is no option for making an expiration column.

> Also columns can be sorted, cookies can be
> searched and actions (delete) applied to only the selection, even in search
> mode. Does that ease your task?

No.  Actually I'd prefer to see all the cookies together for a single site.
So here I see bugzilla.mozilla.org has three cookies set, but if I wanted
to wipe them out, I'd have to hit delete three times.  So a 'condensation'
toggle could help.  But better would be to allow me to delete all cookies that
I have not explicitly allowed.