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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 wa

by foota 5y ago

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.

BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
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.
- jychang 5y ago
  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.
  - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    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).
crazygringo 5y ago
Exactly this. All the functionality is already built into Chrome right here: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/storage/cookies/ 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.
- canada_dry 5y ago
  > 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).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    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.
    - yccs27 5y ago
      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".
      - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
        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.
      - Matthias1 5y ago
        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_...`.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
qutreM 5y ago
Chrome in 10 years will be like a TV... all you will be able to do is switch between a few hundred channels
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  Browser dev tools are more powerful now than ever before, and they're only a single key press away.
  - qutreM 5y ago
    Dev tools are next... same argument... not many people use them.
    - SquareWheel 5y ago
      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.
      - aravindet 5y ago
        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.
        dtjb 5y ago
        To what end? What benefit does google get by preventing developers from developing for their product?
tyingq 5y ago
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.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  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.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    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.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      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.
topspin 5y ago
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.
feanaro 5y ago
lol. Because it's such an unimaginable hassle having to keep this code lying around in the codebase.
JeremyNT 5y ago
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.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >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.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Millions. Big world out there
    - p_j_w 5y ago
      Percentages are all that really matter here.
- arthur2e5 5y ago
  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”?
yalogin 5y ago
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.

by foota 5y ago

BHSPitMonkey 5y ago

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.

jychang 5y ago
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.
- BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
  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).

crazygringo 5y ago

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

canada_dry 5y ago
> 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).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- renewiltord 5y ago
  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.
  - yccs27 5y ago
    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".
    - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
      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.
    - Matthias1 5y ago
      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_...`.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

qutreM 5y ago

Chrome in 10 years will be like a TV... all you will be able to do is switch between a few hundred channels

SquareWheel 5y ago
Browser dev tools are more powerful now than ever before, and they're only a single key press away.
- qutreM 5y ago
  Dev tools are next... same argument... not many people use them.
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    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.
    - aravindet 5y ago
      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.
      - dtjb 5y ago
        To what end? What benefit does google get by preventing developers from developing for their product?

tyingq 5y ago

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.

renewiltord 5y ago
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.
- tyingq 5y ago
  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.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    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.

topspin 5y ago

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.

feanaro 5y ago

lol. Because it's such an unimaginable hassle having to keep this code lying around in the codebase.

JeremyNT 5y ago

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.

p_j_w 5y ago
>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.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Millions. Big world out there
  - p_j_w 5y ago
    Percentages are all that really matter here.
arthur2e5 5y ago
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”?

yalogin 5y ago

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.