395860 - Camino randomly forgets auto-login cookies at various sites

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 403372

(Camino Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Peter Yang]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007090601 Camino/2.0a1pre (like Firefox/3.0a8pre)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007090601 Camino/2.0a1pre (like Firefox/3.0a8pre)

I am running a recent Camino nightly, but I have observed this ever since the nightlies as far as I can remember.

I frequently (several times a day or more) check my Xanga blog subscriptions, reddit.com, the Camino MozillaZine forums, three WordPress sites, two vBulletin forums, the Adium forums, Slashdot, Facebook, slickdeals.net, and other sites as well. I check the option to "stay logged in" or "remember me," and usually this persists for at least a day or two (the only time I restart Camino is when Camino crashes).

However, seemingly at random, Camino loses my cookies, sometimes in the middle of a browsing session (i.e. no crashes and no restarts). e.g. my reddit.com cookies expire Jan 5 2008, but they were literally set an hour ago because Camino forgot them over the course of a day or two.

I have no addons running and I have wiped my profile, restoring only my bookmarks.

What troubleshooting steps can I take to clarify what's going on and hopefully address a possible bug? Thanks.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Peter Yang]

I should mention that some cookies persist for longer, i.e. I haven't had to login to the Camino and Adium forums for at least a week now. Also, s/nightlies/trunk and branch nightlies/ .

Comment 2

[Stuart Morgan]

Sites can causes the cookies they set to expire at any point while you are visiting them. Are you sure they aren't simply being removed by the sites?

Comment 3

[Peter Yang]

Well, in the case of Reddit, the site cookie is set to expire in 2008, but it usually forgets my login within a few days. In previous builds of Camino I used to stay logged in to every site I visited, and I didn't need to re-enter my password at any of them. I guess I can't verify for sure that, say, Slashdot is removing my cookies, but last night I had to log in for the third time this week.

Comment 4

[Stuart Morgan]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Well, in the case of Reddit, the site cookie is set to expire in 2008, but it
> usually forgets my login within a few days.

Every time you visit a reddit.com page, there is the possibility that the site will forcibly expire the cookie regardless of what its expiration was before.

For a site that's doing this frequently, check just after you leave the site that the cookie is there, then check again just before re-visiting it, so that you can figure out if it's being removed while you are at the site.

Comment 5

[Peter Yang]

Attachment: Screenshots of reddit.com cookies

This archive contains 4 .png screenshots of the cookie list for reddit.com. Picture 1 shows what happens before I log in, Picture 2 shows what happens afterwards. This was on September 15th, three days ago. As you can see, Picture 2 showed a cookie expiring on Sep 29. Throughout the past three days, I stayed logged in.

Picture 3 shows my cookies this morning, which indicates the cookie is gone.  Picture 4 shows what happened after I logged in again.

Does this help at all?

Comment 6

[Peter Yang]

I just want to clarify that this is not normal behavior at all. Formerly with Camino I had no issues in storing these auto-login passwords. Literally every site I store a password at gets forgotten sooner or later, but this never happened before.

Comment 7

[Stuart Morgan]

As I said in comment 4, you need to check after every time you leave the site and before every time you return, and make note of when the cookie vanishes; from your description in comment 5 you were clearly visiting reddit between 2 and 3, so that doesn't really tell us anything. The question is whether it's happening while you are on the site, or during a period of time where you have not visited the site at all.

Comment 8

[Peter Yang]

Attachment: More screenshots

It appears that it occurred during a period of time where I had not visited the site at all. I had four cookies set after I left the site, and one right before I tried to come back.

Comment 9

[Peter Yang]

I have started to notice a trend, which is that cookies are forgotten approximately every three days after they are set. I have tried shifting when I log in to various sites, and Camino forgets cookies approximately around that time. In between, I stay logged in and there's no problem...

Comment 10

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Peter, do you have network.cookie.lifetime.days set (in user.js/prefs.js or about:config)?  What value do you have for network.cookie.lifetimePolicy?

Comment 11

[Peter Yang]

Attachment: My prefs.js file

No, there isn't anything set in my cookies. My prefs.js is attached.

Comment 12

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I think the next step, then, is to create a completely new profile and use it for a few days, long enough to either see the bug or know that it's not happening.

You can simply rename

~/Library/Application Support/Camino

to something else (like "Camino-old") and the next time you launch Camino, it'll make a fresh profile automatically. Run with that for a few days -- you'll have to re-enter login data on sites that store it in cookies, obviously -- and let us know if you start seeing the bug again.

Comment 13

[Peter Yang]

"I have no addons running and I have wiped my profile, restoring only my
bookmarks."

I already did it, but I will try it again. Will let you all know...

Comment 14

[Peter Yang]

It just happened to me again. I immediately lost login cookies to every site I entered passwords for (approximately around the time of my last comment). I did not quit Camino during this time - I literally went back to a link I had looked at 30 minutes ago, and I was not logged in.

Comment 15

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

You lost all your cookies, or just those for the sites you log in to?

Also, were there any messages in the Console.log when this happened?

Comment 16

[Peter Yang]

Just for the sites I log into. Other sites that I visited, like Penny Arcade, the cookies remain there.

I got these console messages:
Oct  9 10:30:20 Nougat /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino: CGBitmapContextCreateImage: invalid context
Oct  9 10:30:20 Nougat /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino: CGBitmapContextCreateImage: invalid context
Oct  9 11:47:50 Nougat /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino: CGBitmapContextCreateImage: invalid context
Oct  9 11:47:52 Nougat /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino: CGBitmapContextCreateImage: invalid context
although I didn't see the last two logs when the cookies were deleted. Something to note is that my machine is actually called Shadow (I recently switched MacBooks). When I cleared the profile, I replaced only the bookmarks.plist, but I suppose that it still uses my old org.mozilla.Camino.plist.

Comment 17

[Peter Yang]

http://pastebin.mozilla.org/216810 lists my console logs. It forgot my bookmarks today around 2:30 PM EDT.

I also got an error at 4:12 PM EDT:
"There was an error writing data to the disk. This error is sometimes caused by a full disk. Please restart this application"

Comment 18

[Stuart Morgan]

Are there similar log messages from previous times it forgot cookies? If so, this is apparently just a symptom of bug 397053.

Comment 19

[Peter Yang]

I believe so, I have seen "the writePropertyListFile: Cocoa error 512. ((null))" and "writePropertyList: Failed to write file /Users/pyang/Library/Application Support/Camino/bookmarks.plist" messages before. I'll keep a lookout for it the next time it happens...

Comment 20

[Stuart Morgan]

Duping based on that; if it turns out to have a different cause, feel free to re-open this, but it sounds extremely likely to be the same underlying issue.

Comment 21

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I suppose it's possible this might be a Core bug, too:

http://shawnwilsher.com/archives/127

Peter, can you remove the Flash plugin for a few days and see if the problem recurs?

Comment 22

[[e-mail]]

pretty sure this is a core bug, filed as bug 403372. re-duping to that for now, but if you find something about the flash plugin as cl says, please reopen.

Comment 23

[Peter Yang]

I have been running without Flash, and I just got some cookies deleted today under the same conditions as in bug 403372, where cookies set on Saturday (~2d ago) get evicted (I have the cookie log and that's what it's showing me). So I think bug 403372 is the real problem.

Comment 24

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Excellent. I'll verify this as a dupe of that then. Peter, thanks for all your help troubleshooting this with us.

Comment 25

[Peter Yang]

Has anyone noticed with the last few days of Camino trunk builds that this is occurring again? I am running Version 2.0a1pre (1.9.0.3pre 2008082800) and I just lost logins to tons of sites that I accessed earlier this morning. This has happened with the last few weeks of trunk builds as well. I am running Flash Player 10 beta, if that makes a difference.