
Chrome “clear cookies on exit” feature does not work - rdslw
https://superuser.com/questions/1298062/chrome-clear-cookies-on-exit-feature-does-not-work
======
JdeBP
Deleted by SuperUser diamond moderators are two answers dated 2019-02-10 that
point to the exact bug report in the Chromium bug reporting system for this.
The Chromium bug report that the deleted answers point to is listed as fixed
as of 2019-02-18.

~~~
viraptor
Could you post those links?

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tacomonstrous
A search on the Chromium issues page shows this: crbug.com/750452

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omosubi
Hopefully this spurs more than a few people to move to Firefox. Im not looking
forward to an all chrome/chromium future

~~~
wool_gather
Firefox has its own problems in this realm, namely that all "Private"
windows/tabs share a single session that persists as long as any of them
exist.

I discovered this recently when I logged in to website X in a Private window,
then closed the window without explicitly logging out, and returned to X later
that day. I had another Private window open (with a completely different
site). I was still logged in to X! because that second Private window had
preserved the session.

This means, of course, that sites you visit simultaneously in separate Private
windows are not isolated _from each other_ either.

I still am mostly happy with Firefox and use it daily, but this was a
completely unexpected and unwelcome behavior.

~~~
pard68
Maybe this is a platform dependant issue? On Arch each private window is
independent, or so it seems. I was actually hoping for what you describe and
instead found that when visiting my company website in two different private
windows I had to login to each window separately. I found this so annoying
because accessing some system amin tools on a few of our pages requires an
annoying number of steps.

~~~
pchr8
I'm on arch and Firefox 66.0.1 and for me the Private windows do share a
session. Containers also fixed it for me, but when I discovered this it was
very unexpected

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d2p
I posted an answer on SO but may be worth repeating here. The screenshots show
"reddit.com" as clear-on-exit and "www.reddit.com" as the owner of the cookie.

When adding a site to the clear-on-exist list, the box shows

    
    
      [*.]example.com
    

I think you need to use

    
    
      [*.]reddit.com
    

if you want to include sub-domains too.

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fouc
Perhaps we need a way to delete chrome, re-install it, and then re-populate w/
the exact cookies we want persisted. Nothing else. No chance for web storage
or other hidden/zombie cookies. This could be done every time the app is
closed.

Quite frankly we need to stop trusting apps, particularly browsers at all. ;)

~~~
stevekemp
I use firefox, and find this function useful:

    
    
         # Open a new firefox instance, with a temporary profile
         function firefox_temp() {
            dir=$(mktemp -d)
            echo "Profile directory: ${dir}"
            firefox --new-instance --profile ${dir}
            echo "Cleaning up .."
            rm -rf ${dir}
         }
    

I'm not familiar with Chrome, but perhaps there is a similar "profile-
directory" argument you can point to a temporary location?

~~~
Ysx
That's interesting... does it behave much differently to private windows?

~~~
stevekemp
If we assume that the private-mode is "secure", then I suspect there's
probably not a huge difference in practice.

But this way I'm very certain extensions, history, local-storage, etc, are
absolutely not available.

(To be honest I tend to use this mostly avoid caching, and other things.
Useful when you're testing redirects and new designs.)

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sasasassy
This is most likely a website keeping the same data in HTML5 web storage,
flash cookies or other, and when noticing one of them has been removed,
repopulating them. These are also sometimes called super, zombie or persistent
cookies.

~~~
cm2187
Hold on. The setting is called “keep local data only until you quit your
browser”. Not “local cookies”. And that’s always how I expected it to work. If
it preserves data from web storage or others than this is either a massive
fuck up or a disingenuous placebo setting.

~~~
toyg
I believe handling of Flash cookies is completely outside the browser.

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votepaunchy
Flash is bundled with and sandboxed by Chrome.

~~~
l24ztj
And disabled by default, too.

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rdslw
This happens for a few years (much older than URL in question).

This happens also in Chromium.

There is (proably?) a logic when cookies will be deleted, but it is under so
strange conditions, that 99% of users who choose this options, DO NOT HAVE
cookies deleted on chrome/quit/restart AT ALL.

:-o

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
Do you have any citations as to how old the issue is?

~~~
r3bl
At least since July 2017, when this bug was opened:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=750452](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=750452)

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jbverschoor
Why are cookies even persisted on disk in the first place when such an option
is enabled?

~~~
adem
I can imagine that multiple tabs/windows don't share the same address space,
so in case of opening the same website on another browser instance, saving to
disk would make sure that the cookie is exposed to other running processes as
well.

~~~
GordonS
Saving to disk is probably one of the simplest ways of sharing data between
processes, but it's far from the only one (e.g. named pipes)

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paulpauper
Still waiting for Google to add a feature to display a warning alert box when
you try to close all tabs by accident, but a decade later no such feature
exists even though everyone wants it, and Firefox has it, and it seems trivial
to implement.

~~~
intellix
If you CMD Q on osx you get a warning

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mrweasel
Which is annoying. I though that would be a good idea, because I occasionally
closed a browser by accident. In reality I more often than not actually want
to close Chrome, and the "press and hold cmd+q" is pretty annoying.

~~~
stordoff
On the flip side, I often hit it accidentally when hitting cmd-w, and I don't
think I ever intentionally hit it. Choosing good defaults is hard.

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wurst_case
Reminds me of door control buttons in an elevator that you use everyday only
to find the button resting on the floor one day, revealing that it was adhered
to the control panel with a hot glue gun the whole time.

~~~
wastholm
I keep hearing that, and apparently that's the case in the US [1]. In Japan,
the buttons are usually very much operational and they have devised a whole
system of etiquette around them. [2]

[1] [https://www.sciencealert.com/the-close-door-buttons-in-
eleva...](https://www.sciencealert.com/the-close-door-buttons-in-elevators-
don-t-actually-do-anything)

[2] [https://boingboing.net/2017/10/12/button-
mashing.html](https://boingboing.net/2017/10/12/button-mashing.html)

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
The US buttons don't work because there are mandatory waiting times for the
doors closing due to the ADA ((your article mentions that)) - they're still
normally plugged in.

~~~
ams6110
I've been in elevators where they definitely did work, with immediate effect.
But also some where they don't seem to do anything.

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electrichead
Serious question, is this a bug in Chrome that affects all cookies or is it
something specific to that reddit.com cookie?

It might be the case that Reddit or another vendor just adds that cookie from
other sites (like within a share button functionality)

~~~
TingPing
As another comment pointed out there is no bug. reddit.com and www.reddit.com
are different origins.

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musicale
Disadvantage for web users who care about privacy; advantage for advertisers
and adtech companies that want to track you.

I wonder if Chromium has the same problem?

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gcb0
good time to remember that Google employees silently rolled back, over years,
every single attempt by chromium contributors to block or add privacy features
(e.g. restrict to same domain) for the referrer http header (which is the
basis of Google ad business)

~~~
wdr1
crbug.com/750452

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RandomGuyDTB
If the cookie is stored in-file somewhere you could probably make a batch file
to delete it and then start chrome and put the shortcut on your desktop and in
your start menu.

