Comments on: Who's eating my Firefox cookies?

Question: Who's eating my Firefox cookies?

caddis — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 13:26:37 -0800

Firefox question: Why do my cookies for sites such as the Washington Post or New York Times keep disappearing? I can not say for sure, but it seems time related - if I do not visit the site in a few weeks all of a sudden it is asking for my login info. Is there some way to prevent this?

By: cedar

cedar — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:44:38 -0800

Versions prior to 1.0 are limited to three hundred cookies before it starts overwriting them. I believe this has been upped to 1000 in the most recent release.

By: boaz

boaz — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:11:45 -0800

See here for how to raise it to an actually reasonable number.

By: yerfatma

yerfatma — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:18:20 -0800

When you set a cookie, you also set an expiration date. You should be able to see when the WaPo or NYT cookie is set to expire by going into "View Cookies" under Options > Privacy

By: neckro23

neckro23 — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:23:08 -0800

What yerfatma said. Cookies typically have a built-in expiration date (anytime from immediately to good ol' 2038). This is set by the server issuing the cookie, not your browser.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 00:22:44 -0800

Thank you Jebus. I've been complaining about this since 2002, but every Mozilla geek I talked to about it totally shined me on with ID10T and PEBKAC types of comments, no slight to yerfatma or neckro23 -- I know WTF I'm doing, thank you very much, and Mozilla kept deleting my cookies. This persisted across Mozilla 0.x-1.x, Netscape 7.x, and Phoenix-Firebird-Firefox, it persisted across different profiles, and persisted across different computers.

I'll have to see if the fix noted at delfuego's site really works, though, because I watched cookie limits very carefully for a time back then and there was no obvious relationship to a presumed 300-cookie limit.

In fact with, allegedly, no fixing of this bug whatsoever, cookie management did improve -- MeFi used to require me to log in pretty frequently, but it's been a rare occurrence for roughly a year now. I still regularly lose cookies for various newspapers and the like, so it's a continuing issue. If I'd ever had the time (and hadn't been so thoroughly dissed by the supposedly-open Bugzilla process) I'd have tried harder to figure out whether it's something about the cookies themselves that makes them prone to early deletion.

By: caddis

caddis — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 05:52:39 -0800

Thank you. I have raised my cookie limit. Now to wait and see if this fixes the problem.