686623 - Clearing cookies removes active logins

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Lady Aleena]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2
Build ID: 20110902133214

Steps to reproduce:

Under Options -> Privacy -> Settings -> History I cleared the cookies, while leaving active logins alone.


Actual results:

When I restarted Firefox, all of my active logins were gone because they were stored in cookies.


Expected results:

My active logins should have remained even after the cookies were cleared.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

You cleared cookies and complain that Firefox deleted them? How should Firefox know which of them are login cookies? How did you 'leave active logins alone' ? Please specify more. I do not see such option in Options -> Privacy -> History .

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0a1) Gecko/20110921 Firefox/9.0a1

Reporter, can you please be more specific about the reproducing steps, as was suggested in Comment 1?

Comment 3

[Lady Aleena]

Options -> Privacy -> History (Clear history when Firefox closes) -> Settings -> History (Cookies and Active Logins)

If Firefox doesn't know the difference between Cookies with Active Logins then why did they get separated?

History is a section heading under Options -> Privacy by the way.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

Please, where do you see any mention of "Active logins" separately from cookies? What is the option called exactly?

Comment 5

[Lady Aleena]

Attachment: Image of menu where cookies and active logins can be cleared upon close of Firefox.

Comment 6

[:aceman]

OK, understand. Have you tried reading the Help behind the Help button? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Clear%20Recent%20History?as=u . It says:

Cookies: Cookies store information about websites you visit, such as site preferences or *login status*. 

Active Logins: If you have logged in to a *website that uses encryption* since you most recently opened Firefox, that site is considered "active". Clearing this logs you out of those sites. 

So, "active logins" (in the dialog) is nothing about cookies, but probably HTTP Auth and such things.

Comment 8

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

I believe the current behavior is by design, as explained in comment 6.  I filed bug 860440 with a proposal to change the design to remove this source of confusion.