622377 - Firefox's tracking cookies cannot be detected by security software unless it is closed.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Julian Adler [:CheckMate]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 GTB7.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 GTB7.1

Running security scans repeatedly do not detect tracking cookies in Firefox. This happened with Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus and now with Norton Internet Security,despite knowing they're their in the coolies folder. When Firefox is completely closed Norton detects them normally and removes them. But if Firefox remains open, no detection at all. This does not happen with IE8 - tracking cookies are detected whether it's open or closed. The same thing happened when I was troubleshooting this issue originally with Spyware Doctor. Reinstalling the software does nothing. The problem clearly is with Firefox. This means that Firefox cannot be used at all during a full scan and this is very inconvenient. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Browse internet normally, creating normal tracking cookies.
2.Run a security scan with Norton Internet Security or Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus but leave Firefox open (as you might often do during a lengthy full scan).
3.Close Firefox without doing any more browsing and run another scan.
Actual Results:  
With Firefox remaining open, Norton won't detect any tracking cookies and reports there are no threats. Opening the Firefox cookies folder,however,proves the tracking cookies are still their. (I'm not referring to the first party cookies - I know the difference). This will happen repeatedly until you close Firefox, then Norton will detect the tracking cookies every time. But again, this is inconvenient to have to close Firefox and not be able to use it during a full scan. The problem is specifically the lack of detection of the tracking cookies, otherwise Firefox can be used normally even during the scans, but unless you're aware of this problem you might think their are no tracking cookies tracking you at all because the scans come up supposedly clean.

Note: Norton inexplicably will detect the cookies on one or two initial scans after installation, but subsequent scans exhibit the problem, and then it happens every single time.

Expected Results:  
The security software should be allowed to routinely detect tracking cookies in Firefox whether it is open or closed, just like Internet Explorer. Causing top security software to give a false result in scans is a potentially serious issue, and even though I certainly know that tracking cookies are generally harmless, they still are tracking and many people consider that a privacy issue. Even case managers at Norton didn't have a clue about this.

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Cookies are stored in a database (cookies.sqlite) which can not be opened by 2 applications at the same time. Think this is either a wontfix or a duplicate of Bug 446068...

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

No software should access or worse write to the database files while they are in use. That often produces corrupted cookies and that is causing weird problems with websites. Most users can't fix this problem themselves. We had enough reports about this in the past caused by your "Top security software".

I will mark this bug wontfix because the locking of the database file is proposed.