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Comment by mtigas | Hacker News Reader

tldr: Author is referring to the ability to enable the "ask me every time a site wants to set a cookie" prompt (a la Firefox). Looks like this has been disabled in the latest Chrome nightly. FUD, etc.

However: In general, cookie controls are still entirely there, so I'm positive that specific feature is what they're referring to. I use an extensive cookie domain blocklist and that's all there and functional. (I've never used said "ask me every time" feature in Chrome, but I went through a phase of using that on Firefox.)

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UPDATE:

Found the relevant checkin: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=51375

Looks like the previous behavior can be re-enabled via the "--enable-cookie-prompt" command line argument.

Perhaps support for re-enabling that by default should go in that bug (or a new one that references it)?

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> I use an extensive cookie domain blocklist and that's all there and functional.

Care to share a rough overview of sites you're blocking, and a little of your reasoning? I tried putting fairly restrictive settings on Firefox one time to see how browsing differed - I noted a lot of sites didn't work without explicit permissions, so that's sort of a hassle. Beyond that, is it privacy considerations? Do you work in a field that you wouldn't want your browsing habits logged and cross-referenced? Vagueness on answer is ok, I'm just kind of curious what your reasoning is, and if there's any utility to me building some kind of blocklist for myself.

I know you weren't asking me, but I have a similar setup. I block everything by default and only enable specific cookies when necessary for functionality. Same with javascript, which Chrome makes pretty easy. I don't have any specific reason except that it feels cleaner not to send a bunch of data over the wire that isn't really necessary.

So, how do you do that then? Some extension I assume?

Nope, the functionality's just built into Chrome. It's actually really easy and convenient.

I allow by default and simply block a (large) number of stat tracking domains and other dubious sites. (Generally I just compiled a large domain list of advertising / stat bug / malware domains, rather than actively patrol my cookies for domains I wanted to block.)

I’ve toyed with doing it the other way around (block by default, use whitelist) but generally it’s too much of a hassle.

This is all more or less a carryover from when I used to be really privacy paranoid — I don’t really have a valid reason outside of that these days. Force of habit. :)

> Author is referring to the ability to enable the "ask me every time a site wants to set a cookie" prompt (a la Firefox)

Agreed. I just did "About Google Chrome" and saw that a new version was available - 7.0.517.24. Crap! Worried I would lose my cookie settings, I quit and restarted, and saw that they were there safe and sound. Only that option to prompt for each website was gone.

I had tried that option for a while but it didn't work quite right -- for certain websites it would continually prompt, "Accept Cookie?" No. "Accept Cookie?" No. etc.

When I clicked the "more info" part of the prompt, it looked like the website was trying to set a different cookie each time -- one that expires tomorrow, one next month, next year, etc.

So it may be a problem with the website, rather than Chrome. Regardless, the behavior was annoying so I selected "Block" all cookies and went with a whitelist, so this missing option doesn't bother me.

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