468888 - Way too many cookie confirmations

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 434971

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Richard Lynch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

If you set up your options to prompt you for cookies, you're going to get a zillion popups asking what to do (allow, allow for session, deny)

They all have a different sub-domain on MySpace CDN.

This piles up and swamps the PC.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Turn on cookie prompting
2. Surf to given URL

Actual Results:  
PC swamped.

Expected Results:  
FF could/should do several things:

#1. Limit the number of these things that can pile up. Period. Nobody wants to click through more than a dozen of these silly things.

#2. Add an "advanced" button on that dialog to let me put in a wildcard for the cookie allow rules. Once I put in a rule, check pending confirmations that match and get rid of them for me.

#3. If I "accept" and check "apply to all" then any pending confirmations that match should go away.
(Won't solve it for this page, but will help for many similar ones)

#4. Add a "deny all pending" to just nuke all the pending cookies, possibly only in the "advanced" (see #1) section.


The wildcard for cookie accept/deny may already be in there somewhere, but I need access to it at the popup rather than after I've already crashed and don't know what the Cookie URL is.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

only one issue/enhancement request in one bug.
 
#1 is invalid, if you don't want warnings then don't enable it. If you want a warning then Firefox must display all warnings.
#2 I don't think we will implement manual adding wildcards. Write an extension for that ?
#3,#4 Isn't Firefox doesn't displaying only one dialog per domain at once and if you remember the decision you will not get additional dialogs from that domain ?
(that's what 3.0.4 is doing for me)

Comment 2

[Richard Lynch]

Unfortunately for a SUB-domain, with LOTS of them, and LOTS of embedded images on the page, Firefox will cheerfully popup a dialog for EACH image, so many dialogs, it will CRASH.

In fact, the images don't even need to be on different sub-domains to exhibit this behaviour - Just a different one that you've never said "Accept" to, and a lot of images on the page.

So, NO, Firefox is NOT displaying only one dialog per domain at once, if you have a ton of images all sending cookies, all on a domain you have not yet accepted.

It will pop up one dialog per image, all on top of another.

For the worst-case scenario, just set up your cookies to always prompt for 3rd party cookies and surf to the URL given in the bug report, and repeated here as well:
http://developer.myspace.com/Community/blogs/devteam/archive/2008/05/20/new-app-guidelines-must-read.aspx
That particular example has all the images (and they are legion) on different sub-domains on Facebook's CDN nodes.

Firefox with manual cookie management "on" makes your machine unusable quite quickly, and probably crashes, eventually, unless you click awfully fast.

This is easily reproducible. Unless you've got 8G of RAM on your desktop or something... :-v

If you don't like any of my proposed naive solutions, by all means come up with something better.

But FF crashing just because I don't accept cookies from anybody who wants to send them is pretty bad, imho.

PS
I tried to send in the crash report, but naturally that failed. I dunno if it's my firewall or the new and improved firefox reporting server/mechanism that isn't accepting them.  The "reporting failed" message was particularly unhelpful in determining WHY my crash report failed to go through. Sigh.

Comment 3

[Richard Lynch]

PS
I realize I suggested ways to fix the bug, but is it really an "enhancement" when I'm reporting something that crashes FF?...

Take out my #1-#4 suggestions, then, and leave it as a plain old "Firefox crashes" bug report. :-)

Comment 4

[timeless]

not really.

first:
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_for_a_bug_report

second:
you're using an unsupported codepath. stop using it.

Comment 5

[Richard Lynch]

3.0.4 is unsupported?
Or not blindly accepting cookies?
I'm about to mark this as a duplicate of:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434971

Comment 6

[Michael Lefevre]

Well, I guess he meant that "ask every time" for cookies is basically not supported.  That can't really be an official position since it is still there in the primary UI.  Glancing over the bugs though, there are a large number of pretty serious bugs with it and not much is happening with them...

See also https://wiki.mozilla.org/Cookies:prompting_ui and stuff linked from there.

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

>I realize I suggested ways to fix the bug, but is it really an "enhancement"
>when I'm reporting something that crashes FF?...

That's the reason why multible issues in one report makes the bug report invalid and invalid would be also a correct resolution for this bug.

If you get a crash then you have to report a different bug with a crash ID (see comment#4)