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Avoid a cookie bug in Safari's reset feature Web Browsers
Here's a bug in Safari -- it doesn't actually reset your cookies unless you open the Preferences -> Show Cookies window. Here's a proof ... open Safari and navigate to a few sites that you know stores a cookie (Google, Mac OSX Hints, Yahoo, etc.). Open Terminal and change to your user's Library -> Cookies directory, and do a cat Cookies.plist to see the list of cookies.

Switch to Safari and choose Safari -> Reset Safari... and Reset. Switch back to the Terminal and cat Cookies.plist again. Surprise, surprise they're still there. Now, switch back to Safari and open Preferences -> Security -> Show Cookies. The list is empty. Back in the Terminal, cat Cookies.plist will also show that the list is empty.

[robg adds: This does seem to be a bit of a bug -- I even tried quitting Safari after choosing reset, but the cookies file was still full when I checked it after re-launch. Very strange...]
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Avoid a cookie bug in Safari's reset feature | 4 comments | Create New Account
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Avoid a cookie bug in Safari's reset feature
Authored by: ralso on May 20, '04 12:30:16PM

I'm not able to reproduce this bug with Safari 1.2.1 (v125.1).
"Safari -> Reset Safari... and Reset" immediately clears my cookies file and history and formvalues.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Also cannot reproduce it
Authored by: hamarkus on May 20, '04 01:31:47PM

Also cannot reproduce it, after resetting 'cat Cookies.plist' just shows one Google cookie, set by the reloading of the page.
OS X 10.3.3, Safaria 1.2.1 (v125.1), w/o Security Update 2004-05-03



[ Reply to This | # ]
Also cannot reproduce it
Authored by: spaminacan on May 22, '04 12:07:57AM

I too cannot reproduce this. Anyways, I usually use Onyx to clean out cookies and it always works like a charm.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Avoid a cookie bug in Safari's reset feature
Authored by: hartshorne on Jun 03, '04 09:33:42AM

I ran into this problem a few months ago while I was building a web site that used cookies. I tried hitting "Remove All", and then running cat Cookies.plist in a shell window immediately afterwards. Cookies.plist was still full. Several seconds later (and without returning to Safari), I ran the cat command again. This time the Cookies.plist file was empty (except for the XML skeleton).

If you wait several seconds before quitting Safari, Safari seems to empty the Cookies.plist file. If instead you quit right away, Safari does not seem to empty the Cookies.plist file. I submitted this to Apple when I first noticed this behavior, but I doubt they'd consider it a priority to change or fix.



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