Your user agent saves the cookies. If you don't like it, change it.
An incredible amount of the web just breaks. Twitter, Reuters, Imgur. Like it's one thing if, when I attempt to log in, your log in fails (and usually, logins fail to handle the error & will just loop back to the start, that's at least a start) but a lot of the web will have a flash-of-text and then nothing, & JS has crashed.
They are things that your browser happily rebroadcasts back to the server with no real UI for it outside of the shitty devtool bar made for devs, even after all this outcry about cookies.
It reminds me of the meme of the guy riding a bicycle, throwing a branch into the spokes (rebroadcasting cookies), and then roaring in pain on the ground about how evil websites/advertisers are tracking him with cookies.
That said, what a lame HN thread on a post about Haskell.
I wish there was a good way to visually differentiate when a new top comment starts except by squinting and figuring out the whitespace from the left of the mobile screen, more painful than necessary I presume.
Yeah, I think both (A) defaulting to auto-expanded threads and (B) making them annoying to collapse make HN worse than it could be.
You tend to read the top-level thread because it's already there. And then it ends up being longer than you expected, or you're trapped in a subtree that just won't end, or you just want to see what other people are saying. And there's no good way to move past it.
Would be nice to click the indentation to collapse the thread anywhere inside the tree.
Every marketing cookie generates revenue for the website in some way or another. The website wants revenue, so it asks the user agent to maintain those cookies. The user agent agrees. Then the operator of the user agent gets upset that the website asked their agent to store the cookies? Get upset that your agent agreed, not that a request was made.
Or better yet, don't get upset at all and just solve the darned problem yourself. Is this Hacker News or Complier News?
Or how do you solve this problem? Personally, the most I can be arsed to do is install some Adblock Plugin. I did that only a few months ago and I'm not even sure that it improved my experience by a lot.
Absence of cookies don't make things unstable (non-solid?), and fuck knows what 'modern' is supposed to mean, or why it's good.
> Or how do you solve this problem?
Block all cookies except for rare moments like posting on HN, which then immediately get deleted. And no JS, which means CPU is trivial (so no burn-a-core-for-every-open-tab which is so common with page-sized pointless animations). Many problems can be solved if you want them to be.
If I do need anything more, there's VMs. BTW what 'fun and inspiring information' do you refer to? Shadertoy is a loss I grant, but what else?
Deleting Cookies on exit (and/or at regular intervals) will probably not help much in terms of avoiding tracking, especially if you log back in using your reinitialized cookies.
which again you don't give.
> Anything that requires interactivity ... obviously require Javascript
jeez, no shit, I get it.
> (some defeatist blah about cookies)
Whatever.
You just persistently don't get it. These are my choices. I made them carefully. They suit me. They may not suit you. We could even compromise if you made an effort to see what I'm after but you won't/can't. Now please try to understand I'm not you, and just back off!
Also, where is this burn-a-core-for-every-open-tab stuff? Many websites are highly optimized and do not use much CPU. Not enough to be noticed without actually looking at the numbers anyway.
What sites have page size animations these days?
I don't want them to. I log back in if necessary (browser remembers id/pswd). For those few I need to stay logged in, I use a VM and save the state - I'm more concerned about controlling JS than cookies in such cases.
> And how would be have any web apps that aren't horrendous without JS?
I don't use web apps. My tradeoff.
> Also, where is this burn-a-core-for-every-open-tab stuff? Many websites are highly optimized and do not use much CPU.
Oddly, it seems to be corporate bullshit sites that are the worse offenders. Can't find one but you're right, it's not all by any means. I retract.
But I think the vast majority of people would be upset if sites didn't keep you logged in and there were no web apps.
It's even worse if you prefer FOSS and use web apps, since Chromium no longer has password sync, Brave and FF block advanced features, and if you use BitWarden it takes a few extra clicks.
Yeah. The less info the more clipart/general crap you'll get. Weird innit.
As to your other points, I can't argue. I accept a higher level of inconvenience for a higher level of security, that's just my choice. I won't inflict it on others who make different tradeoffs.
The Cisco survey(https://iapp.org/news/a/new-cisco-study-emphasizes-consumer-...) says 79% are willing to invest time or money to protect their privacy, but a lot less seem to actually do anything about it.
Almost everyone I know is on Facebook and Gmail, most seem to use Chrome, etc.
It seems to vary a lot with subculture. Programmers always seem to be more willing to sacrifice convenience, and people who watch porn seem to be more interested in privacy than most.
I suspect there's a pretty large segment that only cares in theory, at most, and only then just on principle because of the other people who have more interesting data.
Maybe not 95% but probably 90% of certain subsets at least.
Hint: it's under Tools|Preferences in firefox/palemoon
There is no setting anywhere, in any web browser, to "retain cookies that are technically necessary and reject marketing cookies" which is the desirable behaviour.
(Some possible control via Tools|Preferences|Exceptions... button allows you to customise by website, although I've never used it. Or just disallow all, which is what I do)
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Edit: answer the question please, there may be an easy solution to what you want.
Edit2: No reply because god forbid there's an actual way you could take control, that would simply ruin everything (in a parallel universe, man complains the streets are rife with face stabbing but when presented with proof they're not, stabs self in face to prove otherwise).
Biggest problem with learned helplessness is that they like it that way. Gives them something to be angrily resentful about.
The only entity that can specify whether a cookie is marketing-related or not is the website. No one else can.
I used umatrix for years but gave up. The guessing what to enable to get a site to work got tiresome, and IIRC there was also problem with browser support.
We should all complain loudly and far more than we do about the creeping tendency of many companies to do so many obviously shitty things, instead of merely shrugging our shoulders.
The only entity with any real power to decide which cookies the website uses is the website itself.
Asking the user or the user agent to comb through cookies and decide, one by one, which ones seem marketing-related and which ones are technically required, and then block, is way too much to ask from a regular internet user.
I have tried, but fail to see good faith in your reply.
You don't even have to shift through cookies for this to work, you can just reject all by default until the user explicitly request them to be stored (or use a whitelist or wait until the users tried to login that would necessitate a cookie, etc.) Lots of possibilities.
> is way too much to ask from a regular internet user.
That's kind of the point. By making it all transparent and seamless browser makers played into the hand of marketing companies. If cookies had a cost and would degrade the user experience, they might be thinking twice before putting hundreds of them on a site.
Marketing companies are just making use of the tools they are given. And browser manufacturers gave them a lot of tools, while taking control away from the user.
> That's kind of the point. By making it all transparent and seamless browser makers played into the hand of marketing companies. If cookies had a cost and would degrade the user experience, they might be thinking twice before putting hundreds of them on a site.
Cookies do have a cost, namely the bad PR from people complaining about the unnecessary tracking cookies. If you think that's not enough, then you are free to reject cookies as well to degrade your own experience. But they aren't mutually exclusive. Complaints and bad PR can also drive users away from the site and enact change.
Simply put, browser could to a lot better job at preventing this.
As for legitimate use, I don't really see much. Login handling is the obvious one, but I'd argue that login handling itself is in dire need of a rework and should be handled by a proper Web standard, not site specific hacks and "Save password" guesswork.
As for legitimate use cases, I think shopping carts on most online marketplaces use cookies.
The website is the one who decides which cookies to send in the first place. The browser never invents a cookie out of thin air.
> you can just reject all by default until the user explicitly request them to be stored
Which cookies should the user "request to be stored" and which cookies can the user safely ignore? How does the user tell them apart? Why should the user have to bother?
> If cookies had a cost and would degrade the user experience
Cookies are already degrading my user experience; you may have noticed the cookie consent popups on many sites. Those popups exist because cookies were being abused (ie. non-consensually) for purposes that are not essential to the functioning of the website. Such uses are now banned in the EU.
> And browser manufacturers gave them [marketing companies] a lot of tools
Browser manufacturers did not build those tools for the sake of marketing companies.
I can't fault websites for making use of functions the browser offers them.
> Which cookies should the user "request to be stored"
Have a simple toggle button for "Save state for this website" and discard everything when that button isn't pressed. Most website I visit I don't care about and have no need to keep any state. The few that I need to log into, I can just press that button. Knit that together with the "Save Passwords" function and it might be pretty much automatic most of the time.
> Those popups exist because cookies were being abused
Those popups exist because browsers failed to do their job. If the users wants warning for cookies, that's something the browsers can do just fine by itself, yet few do (e.g. Lynx).
> Browser manufacturers did not build those tools for the sake of marketing companies.
I'd disagree on that. Google makes their money with ads, so of course they'll optimize both Chrome and Search for maximum ad friendliness. Meanwhile Firefox is also run on Google ad money, so they can't step to far out of line either. There aren't many browsers that are build for the user first. The "you are the product" quote applies to browsers just as much as it does to Facebook.
I have JS locked down and third-party cookies disabled. This site only managed to set one cookie for me because of my power to decide. Despite that, all content was readable.