9/26/2003 10:55:00 AM
Cookies are delicious delicacies. That's what the Options panel in Firebird says. For almost a year, I've been manually going through my list of cookies and permanently blocking many of them. The number has reached more than 250. And then Firebird got Whitelisting. "Great," I thought, "I can train my browser about which cookies I want to keep and then just set it to deny the rest of them. So I've been dutifully surfing the web with "Ask me first" turned on for the past few weeks. Now the list is up to 319 blocked cookies (code 0F in cookperm.txt). Today I decided to put that into use. Is it just me, or is there no checkbox to say "Allow only the whitelist?" I propose that we need a new cookie handling model.
Where is the option to move an existing website to the whitelist? There's a checkbox to prevent removed cookie sites from ever being set again. When I used to use Internet Explorer, I found a great utility called Cookies Manager. Cookies Manager works on the principle of three buckets: Whitelist, Blacklist, and Undecided. The keepers are on the left, the rejects on the right. Simple buttons are used to move sites between them. This application wasn't hooked into IE, so it wasn't a true whitelist or blacklist. But running it after you've been surfing would purge the bad cookies. Firebird now has two seperate panels for managing cookies. The exceptions list shows everything that you've whitelistand and blacklisted all in one list. There is no toggle to change one from Allow to Block or vice versa. I'm not willing to try it without backing up my cookies first, but I wonder if that Remove All button will have a confirmation dialog.
I propose that Firebird have a similar window, Blocked on one side, Allowed on the other. Undecideds would be in the middle. Here would be the options.
- Enable Cookies
- for the originating website only
- for sites only on my whitelist
- for sites only on my whitelist, all others session-only
- for the current session only
- but ask before accepting if they are not on my whitelist
I think it is also important to have (yet another) tray icon indicating when cookies have been set or blocked. Four different possible images would show up: no cookies, allowed cookies, blocked cookies, allowed and blocked cookies. Look at the way the latest Pinball theme handles the security, pop-up, and stylesheet statusbar indicators. Each only has 2 states, but the concept is the same. Either a preference page, just about:config, or userChrome can be used to hide the statusbar icons we choose to ignore. Personally, I wouldn't want to show that icon, but some people might. Of course it would launch that three bucket window letting the user choose what to do.
Edit: adding related bugs
