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As I remember it, this was an option you could enable in Netscape Navigator back in the dialup days. In practice it meant that every time you went to a new webs

As I remember it, this was an option you could enable in Netscape Navigator back in the dialup days. In practice it meant that every time you went to a new website you'd have to click ok on a dozen popup menus asking for permission to store each individual cookie before the page would load. I'm sure there are ways to make that process go a little more smoothly but in practice it's still probably something that most users would immediately turn right off.

cheez 7y ago
Oh my god, you just triggered some horrifying memories of that popup. No, you definitely don't want the web browser to ask.
- kbrosnan 7y ago
  In the dial-up days I remember turning on ask to set cookies. It was fairly common to need to deny 10-20 cookie requests even back then. Now there are extensions to manage website trackers that deal with more than just cookies. Extensions are a ton better than having the user agree to each cookie that is sent.
  - cheez 7y ago
    Yep.
- jwagenet 7y ago
  You don’t want the browser to ask because the large number of cookies is so normal.
  - cheez 7y ago
    It was brutal even back then.
weinzierl 7y ago
If I remember correctly the UI for this existed long after Netscape Navigator. According to [1] it was removed in Firefox 44 in early 2016. I had expected that they only removed the UI but left the functionality available via about:config but that doesn't seem to be the case. EDIT: According to [2] and [3] it seems the behavior was triggered by about:config network.cookie.lifetimePolicy set to 1 (ASK_BEFORE_ACCEPT), but the meaning of 1 apparently has changed over the years. At least setting it to 1 doesn't trigger any cookie dialogs in my Firefox 70.0.1 (64-bit). [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2016/02/05/firefox-44ask-me-everytime-cookie-option-removed/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/02/05/firefox-44ask-me-everytime... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233339 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233339 [3] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.cookie.lifetimePolicy http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.cookie.lifetimePolicy

cheez 7y ago

Oh my god, you just triggered some horrifying memories of that popup. No, you definitely don't want the web browser to ask.

kbrosnan 7y ago
In the dial-up days I remember turning on ask to set cookies. It was fairly common to need to deny 10-20 cookie requests even back then. Now there are extensions to manage website trackers that deal with more than just cookies. Extensions are a ton better than having the user agree to each cookie that is sent.
- cheez 7y ago
  Yep.
jwagenet 7y ago
You don’t want the browser to ask because the large number of cookies is so normal.
- cheez 7y ago
  It was brutal even back then.

weinzierl 7y ago

If I remember correctly the UI for this existed long after Netscape Navigator. According to [1] it was removed in Firefox 44 in early 2016. I had expected that they only removed the UI but left the functionality available via about:config but that doesn't seem to be the case. EDIT: According to [2] and [3] it seems the behavior was triggered by about:config network.cookie.lifetimePolicy set to 1 (ASK_BEFORE_ACCEPT), but the meaning of 1 apparently has changed over the years. At least setting it to 1 doesn't trigger any cookie dialogs in my Firefox 70.0.1 (64-bit). [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2016/02/05/firefox-44ask-me-everytime-cookie-option-removed/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/02/05/firefox-44ask-me-everytime... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233339 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233339 [3] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.cookie.lifetimePolicy http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.cookie.lifetimePolicy