News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by foota on Friday September 03, 2021 @04:33PM (#28409060)
I don't get why people think this is a move with some agenda, most likely they just don't think enough people use the single cookie deletion functionality to warrant having it in the settings vs the dev tools.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by crazygringo on Friday September 03, 2021 @04:53PM (#28409288)
Exactly this. All the functionality is already built into Chrome right here:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/storage/cookies/

Contrary to the headline, Chrome isn't removing the ability to do anything -- they're just removing it from the preferences interface, where I'm not sure it really ever made sense to include in the first place.

Truly, editing/deleting individual cookies isn't something any regular user ever needs to do -- just clearing per-site, which continues to exist in preferences.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by canada_dry on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:18PM (#28409536)
> deleting individual cookies isn't something any regular user ever needs to do

I disagree. A problem just recently with a gov site req'd you delete their cookies to resolve it (as an interim solution until they get around some year to fix the issue).

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by Clewza313 on Friday September 03, 2021 @08:03PM (#28410810)
The change is for clearing individual cookies. You can still clear cookies per site.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by lobocinza on Saturday September 04, 2021 @12:08AM (#28411993)
Don't know if the same government but I can't access the site to pay the taxes which I have to pay monthly without clearing cookies.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by Akronymus on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:10PM (#28409980)
Or also twitter, where it is unusable without logging in/blocking cookies (Which you can do from the preferences)
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by renewiltord on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:28PM (#28409632)
Right, so clear all the cookies for the gov site. Previously you could do that and now you can do that. Nothing has changed for this use case.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by yccs27 on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:42PM (#28409747)
Settings vs dev tools does make a huge difference imo.

The settings pane gives you a cleaner ui for quick changes (debatable, but I certainly feel this way). Dev tools can break your browser if you do things wrong. They are made for development and deep changes, not routine stuff.

That is not "nothing has changed".

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by KingMachiavelli on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:11PM (#28409990)
You can still clear cookies for a single site by clearing all data for the site. Does not require devtools. If a site is bad enough to require clearing cookies, clearing the cache & stored data is probably not a bad idea.

If your site needs users to clear cookies, then you should fix your site. Clearing cookies is not a routine thing.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by Matthias1 on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:12PM (#28409999)
You can still clear all cookies for a given site from within preferences.

They're removing the listing of individual cookies for each site. So you can still remove all cookies from, e.g. Hacker News, but will no longer be able to see the individual names of the cookies, e.g. `ph_6CDb7STpzm64A_...`.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by zacmps on Friday September 03, 2021 @07:52PM (#28410734)
Dev tools absolutely cannot break your browser if you 'do things wrong'.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by missblit on Friday September 03, 2021 @08:31PM (#28411005)
Hmm, I've never had devtools break my browser despite using it fairly extensively. I think I confused myself once by forgetting about a local override I had turned on, or accidentally cleared more cookies than I intended to, but that's about it.

I have had locally compiled builds break my profile data once or twice, but that's a seperate issue.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by livindub on Friday September 03, 2021 @08:46PM (#28411092)
You can still delete per site cookies in the preferences no?
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by renewiltord on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:55PM (#28410360)
It is still in 'Settings', guys. It's in chrome://settings/content/all instead of chrome://settings/siteData . Read the third and fourth sentences of the linked article. You will literally be able to browse to it in Settings.

I do have to commend you on the bold tone while being so misleading, though. Haha, good stuff. I propose a Law of Increasing Internet Indignation: indignation is a monotonically decreasing function of knowledge.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by michaelmrose on Friday September 03, 2021 @08:08PM (#28410857)
Regarding renewiltord's law.

Physician heal thyself.

> If you click the disclosure triangle for one of the entries, you see… well, basically nothing about the site data. And there are no delete buttons for individual cookies. The only button is "Clear data", an all or nothing option.

Site guidelines suggest that you ought to assume good faith on the part of your conversational partners and responsd courteously to the good faith interpretation of their words.

I suggest you have simply misunderstood what people are complaining about.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by renewiltord on Friday September 03, 2021 @08:57PM (#28411138)
I picked my words kind of carefully. "Clear all the cookies for the gov site". It'll solve the problem. Then the other guy misunderstood and thought it was a DevTools not Settings issue. Literally the problem does not require "clear one cookie" functionality.

That's not good faith interpretation. That's wholesale misinterpretation which is either incompetence or malice. If you want to play the whole "good faith" game, you actually need good faith.

You're all privacy groupies. You don't know anything about actual privacy. You're just an outrage squad. You know it. I know it. But you're performing for some absent audience that supposedly can't tell.

Fine, this site is yours. Keep it. I'll go play with the shellfish.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by feanaro on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:46PM (#28410289)
> where I'm not sure it really ever made sense to include in the first place.

So move it somewhere where it makes more sense.

> Truly, editing/deleting individual cookies isn't something any regular user ever needs to do

No true Scotsman? If the user needs to do this, they're automatically not a regular user, or what?

Anyway, hard disagree.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by zamadatix on Friday September 03, 2021 @07:34PM (#28410616)
> So move it somewhere where it makes more sense.

>> All the functionality is already built into Chrome right here: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/storage/cookies/

It can't both be redundant and be solved by moving one of the interfaces somewhere else. Either you meant to say it's not redundant and is needed but didn't list any reasons why you think this or your idea of simply moving the redundant interface elsewhere doesn't change the point made as it'd still be rudundant and not needed, just elsewhere.

> No true Scotsman? If the user needs to do this, they're automatically not a regular user, or what?

The "No true Scotsman" fallacy comes after redefining the group once a valid counterexample from the original group is defined. It's not a fallacy in itself just to claim a group has an attribute, the claim is still falsifiable and testable by bringing forth the counter case to why a non-developer needs or wants to use a separate settings UI for it. "non-devoloper" wording chosen instead of "regular user" particularly because the ability is still in the developer UI and maybe that'll make the claim about "regular users" a little more defined.

If this were disabling the ability for users to clear cookies for a single site I'd hard disagree but I'm wracking my brain to find a realistic case a non-developer user needs/wants to view and clear individual cookies instead of site based cookies or all cached objects for that specific page. It's seemingly by definition only useful when identifying and fixing bugs from reviewing the source/dev console logs and "clear the cookies for the specific site" is already seemingly rare enough for a user to be told to do by generic troubleshooting. If being told to do it by a developer or support agent the console is still there and again I think it's fair to say we are veering far from typical things that user cares to have in a settings UI vs where it is in the dev console.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by feanaro on Sunday September 05, 2021 @05:54AM (#28422879)
> It can't both be redundant and be solved by moving one of the interfaces somewhere else. Either you meant to say it's not redundant [...]

I never said it was redundant. Perhaps you mixed me with someone else?

Regardless of how you call the fallacy, I think there still is one since the vagueness of the term "regular user" seems to implicitly define out the users that would need to access the cookie dialogue.

If the wording is switched to "non-developer", then I once again disagree with this conclusion. Non-developers should definitely retain the ability to view, edit and delete their cookies.

I view this mostly as a matter of power. Yes, non-developers won't be editing or deleting individual cookies most of the time. However, if a website starts misbehaving and attempts to seize control of some part of experience from the end user, the end user must have the ability to counter that.

Having the ability to delete and edit pieces of information stored by websites on the user agent is a crucial part of that. If you take this ability away, then you ever so slightly took control out of the hands of the end user. In the end, you are making the user powerless and submitting them under your control.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by BHSPitMonkey on Friday September 03, 2021 @04:44PM (#28409196)
The hyperbole in this thread is insane. I would wager that none of the furious "this is pure evil!" commenters in this thread even knew this particular settings page existed before today (and I'd bet they still don't know the information is already exposed in the URL bar).

Nobody who isn't a web developer is out there trying to guess what individual cookie names/values mean or wants to delete individual ones. At most, they just want to be able to clear them per-site (or across the entire browser).

Anyone else will use the Developer Tools UI that's better suited for the task.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by jychang on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:42PM (#28410252)
Deleting cookies for a group of sites is essential, though, and they're removing that.

Think facebook.com, fbcdn.net, etc.

I end up having to delete cookies for Cars.com every other week, because sometimes the search function would corrupt something and every page would return a blank white screen.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by BHSPitMonkey on Friday September 03, 2021 @07:24PM (#28410546)
No they're not. That feature exists on chrome://settings/content/all, which the article states they're keeping (as it's preferred over the separate menu being removed).
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by JeremyNT on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:48PM (#28410313)
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Make a useful feature difficult to discover, then remove it when few people discover it. The (not insignificant) current barrier for normal users to selectively remove cookies will be made even higher if you ask them to use dev tools.

One could imagine a browser vendor who made this workflow easy because they thought it was in the users' best interest. Obviously, that browser vendor is not Google.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by arthur2e5 on Friday September 03, 2021 @11:26PM (#28411823)
I recall being quite pissed when Chrome decided to remove the pick-character-encoding feature essential for digging through archives of older CJK sites. Odd things keep rolling out of the Chrome team with telemetry as their justification. Ah well, how am I supposed to argue against “data”?
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by p_j_w on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:51PM (#28410330)
>Make a useful feature difficult to discover, then remove it when few people discover it.

How many people do you really think would ever need this feature in day to day use, even if it were extremely easy to find? The number is probably vanishingly small.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by ipaddr on Friday September 03, 2021 @07:30PM (#28410593)
Millions. Big world out there
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by p_j_w on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @11:08AM (#28445792)
Percentages are all that really matter here.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by tyingq on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:17PM (#28409526)
Maybe it's changed, but walking a customer through clearing some specific cookies was a common help desk thing. To deal with shitty websites...PayPal had this problem for a long time where you would get an obscure error until you manually cleared a cookie.

This will be harder, especially where you need to clear cookies on different domains like a login page, saml page, account page, etc.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by renewiltord on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:30PM (#28409643)
You had to clear one cookie on Paypal and leave the rest? Jesus Christ, what a nightmare! Do you happen to recall what situation that was? Just curious to read in a Daily WTF sense, not challenging you to prove it.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by tyingq on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:07PM (#28409957)
You could clear "all cookies for all sites", but that tends to piss customers off, as pre-filled fields for many websites are no longer pre-filled.

If I remember right, clearing it for one site didn't help because clearing "login.paypal.com" cookies didn't clear "some-other-thing.paypal.com" or "www.paypal.com". They seem to use www.paypal.com for everything now.

Google for: "paypal Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand" for one example

Or "paypal your last action could not be completed" for another.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by renewiltord on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:16PM (#28410029)
I googled for those and it's funny but sadly not as entertaining as I'd hoped. All the responses involve clearing all cookies for paypal.com at al.

> If I remember right, clearing it for one site didn't help because clearing "login.paypal.com" cookies didn't clear "some-other-thing.paypal.com" or "www.paypal.com". They seem to use www.paypal.com for everything now.

Right, but that's not a problem that this particular change is going to do anything about. Previously, you had to find all the different paypal domains and whack their cookies and now you have to do the same. The functionality you can't do in the Preferences window now (but you can in DevTools) is find a single cookie in a single site and whack that one. That's the one that would be Daily WTFy.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by tyingq on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:38PM (#28410215)
Ah, got it. I read the screenshots as the "search" was also going away. I do have that 'single cookie' thing with another service where I have to delete one called TICKET_something, but I'll fumble through it I suppose, or use an extension.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by renewiltord on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:58PM (#28410377)
I've mostly used this functionality to get my cookie out for Phantombuster.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by topspin on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:20PM (#28409551)
Seems like this capability would be better served with an extension. Most (as in nearly all) users will never play with individual cookies and the people that need to can turn to quality extensions with more capability than the browser is ever likely to build in.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by yalogin on Friday September 03, 2021 @09:46PM (#28411368)
Yeah no. This is used by a lot of the population, may be not enough to register in their measurements but it’s a good number. Not just that, this is a functionality that existed for so many years in every browser, why remove it? At this point the code comes almost free. The only explanation is they want to prepare their users to a time when cookies are gone.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by qutreM on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:15PM (#28409495)
Chrome in 10 years will be like a TV... all you will be able to do is switch between a few hundred channels
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by SquareWheel on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:31PM (#28409652)
Browser dev tools are more powerful now than ever before, and they're only a single key press away.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by qutreM on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:54PM (#28409849)
Dev tools are next... same argument... not many people use them.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by SquareWheel on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:18PM (#28410040)
You can't have consumers without producers. Dev tools are an integral tool to building websites and webapps today. They're still receiving considerable investment from browser vendors. I see new features in almost every release.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by aravindet on Friday September 03, 2021 @10:08PM (#28411456)
Browser tools could certainly be un-bundled from the browser itself and distributed behind a "Google Developer" account, with your access cut off if you do something that threatens any of Google's numerous businesses.

I believe this is how iOS development works.

Admittedly we are very far away from this scenario, but let us not delude ourselves into thinking (a) that it's impossible, or (b) that it's not in Google's interest to do this once they are confident enough in their market power.

Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by dtjb on Friday September 03, 2021 @11:39PM (#28411878)
To what end? What benefit does google get by preventing developers from developing for their product?
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by zo1 on Saturday September 04, 2021 @03:22AM (#28412870)
They won't prevent developers from developing their product. The change will be an "improvement". It'll be "a new developer focused tool for testing and developing your web sites" or some other marketing speak. Or it'll be an app you install from the chrome store.
Re:Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data con... by feanaro on Friday September 03, 2021 @06:44PM (#28410271)
lol. Because it's such an unimaginable hassle having to keep this code lying around in the codebase.