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Firefox cookies v83.0

  • 5 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by kramster

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I have a particular site I work with daily. It requires a cookie to allow access form any device. The cookie has a life of 3 months. In my Firefox setting I have NOT set delete cookies on closing Firefox and I have set this domain as an exception always to be allowed. This morning, and on 3 other recent occasions, I have been able to access this site but suddenly, while the PC (Windows 10 64-bit) is still running and Firefox has not been closed I find I have to re-enter the cookie from the application because it has been deleted. Other cookies are still there. Last night I did run virus scanners and CC-Cleaner BUT this cookie was there this morning and has been for 4 hours until it disappeared. On the previous 3 occasions I had not run any scanners. Any ideas? Also, as an aside, in Firefox we used to be able to click on a domain to examine the cookies - whay has this been removed?

I have a particular site I work with daily. It requires a cookie to allow access form any device. The cookie has a life of 3 months. In my Firefox setting I have NOT set delete cookies on closing Firefox and I have set this domain as an exception always to be allowed. This morning, and on 3 other recent occasions, I have been able to access this site but suddenly, while the PC (Windows 10 64-bit) is still running and Firefox has not been closed I find I have to re-enter the cookie from the application because it has been deleted. Other cookies are still there. Last night I did run virus scanners and CC-Cleaner BUT this cookie was there this morning and has been for 4 hours until it disappeared. On the previous 3 occasions I had not run any scanners. Any ideas? Also, as an aside, in Firefox we used to be able to click on a domain to examine the cookies - whay has this been removed?

All Replies (5)

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Hi kramster, when you are on a page, you can view its cookies using the Storage Inspector (Shift+F9). https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/Storage_Inspector

It's puzzling for one cookie (or one site's cookies) to be singled out for removal if they have not expired.


Not sure the following is relevant if you use this site daily:

A recent version of Firefox introduced a feature to remove cookies for sites that do not appear in your browsing history. That purge is scheduled to run approximately daily. If you like to clear your history, these features are not compatible. Here are the steps to make sure that cookie purge doesn't run:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste purge and pause while the list is filtered

(3) If the privacy.purge_trackers.enabled preference does not have a value of false, double-click it to switch the value from true to false

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Thanks jscher2000 - I'll give that a try. As you said it's puzzling that it has affected just one site's cookies. Interesting that was the only site in my exception list until this morning so I wonder whether it is a bug in the purge feature. I'm almost sure that I had other exceptions because I have 3 other sites that use cookies in the same way and would have put them in the exception list - not certain of this though.

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Oh dear jscher2000 - I turned off the purge feature and almost immediately my cookies in the exceptions list disappeared leaving only cookies that are not in that list.

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That doesn't make sense. If purge_trackers is false, that feature should not run, and of course if you have history from the sites, it shouldn't clear those cookies.

Are your exceptions ALLOW permissions or ALLOW FOR SESSION permissions? Of course, your session shouldn't end in the middle of using Firefox, only when you formally Exit it using either the menu or closing the last window. But nothing else comes to mind that would be a built-in feature to clear cookies.

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I confirm my exceptions are set to ALLOW and privacy.purge_trackers.enabled is set to false still. So far today I have had no recurrence. This is getting weirder.