Safari's cookie sort order explained
Sep 12, '05 09:27:00AM
Contributed by: wnorris
If you browse your Safari cookies by looking in the Safari preference pane, you'll notice that the cookies seem to in alphabetical order, sorta. It didn't dawn on me until I really looked closely at it -- the domains are sorted alphabetically based on their reverse domain name. So given the following domains:
- macosxhints.com
- apple.com
- php.net
- whitehouse.gov
- www.apple.com
- mozilla.org
they would be sorted in the following order (shown in reverse notation to better explain the sort order logic):
- com.apple
- com.apple.www
- com.macosxhints
- gov.whitehouse
- net.php
- org.mozilla
This reverse notation may seem unfamiliar for anyone not having worked with Java packages, OS X preference files, or one of a host of other places it is used. While it may seem rather unintuitive, it allows "apple.com" and "www.apple.com" to be displayed together in the sorted list. And you wouldn't necessarily want to display them in reverse notation, as that could be equally confusing for users. (For sake of comparison, Firefox sorts cookies based on their normal notation.)
Comments (7)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050908011157498