Re: [dev] [surf] Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?

>>>>> "SW" == Sean Whitton <sean_AT_silentflame.com> writes:

    SW> From when I started using surf, I found it a bit annoying how
    SW> cookies don't seem to 'stick' - logging into things like, say,
    SW> Google Calendar doesn't persist for more than a few hours when you
    SW> tick "remember me", which is something that a lot of services
    SW> have. Is this a problem with how surf stores cookies, or
    SW> something that most of the websites that allow login have that
    SW> clashes with surf and relies on quirks of the more popular
    SW> browsers?

I'm not sure if this is the root of your problem but last time I looked
surf definitely had issues with session cookies (i.e. cookies with no
expiry date set). changecookie() turns them into cookies with a lifetime
of now+sessiontime (config.def.h sets this to 3600s) and stores them in
~/.surf/cookies.txt. This means that if you start a new surf then the
cookies will get used (probably what one expects if one wants to think of
multiple surf instances as equivalent to the multiple tabs of other
browsers) but it also means they'll stop being used after an hour even if
you don't close the surf down. This is most definately not expected
session cookie behaviour.

I've been meaning to look at ways of fixing it for a while now but just
haven't had time. I was reluctant to report it without also being able to
provide working code to improve the situation.

As an aside personally I'd also like surf to be able to apply some form of
selective cookie accept/deny policy. I was imagining some form of
external surf-policy process that a running surf could connect to and
consult (I think uzbl uses a similar idea). I was wondering too if this
could maybe tie up with the SSL certificate issues that cropped up
recently and provide a mechanism for surf to accept or reject server
certs. Heck it would also be nice to have this dictate a javascript
on/off policy.

Moon on a stick too please :-)

    SW> It's got worse this week, in that surf has basically stopped
    SW> accepting cookies at all, and I can't login to any websites as I
    SW> either get logged out immediately, or I get "your browser's cookie
    SW> support is turned off". I've managed to fix this by simply
    SW> deleting my cookies file and starting again, but this shouldn't
    SW> happen so is probably a bug.

Sorry, can't explain this one. Can only speculate that the cookies.txt
somehow got mangled.
Received on Thu Mar 11 2010 - 12:07:30 UTC