What's up with that?!
I made Sweet Productions a favorite so I could log in and use the board. When I checked in Cookie, I found that SP had installed a tracking cookie!
That's a tad unsettling... and quite ironic!
What's it used for? And, do you get the irony?! It seems problematic, given the raison d'être of Cookie itself!
Greetings!
Been a devoted user of Cookie for several years now (even back in the days when it was Safari Cookies).
I have it set up for a very small set of acceptable cookies. As I browse, new ones appear and are, as per the option set, deleted within a few minutes. All good. Works like a charm.
However...
Today, I happened to check within Safari itself and *found 342 cookies! *Along with the kind message from Apple that they could be trackers!
They were NOT showing up inside Cookie!
I've now deleted them ALL-- I know that this will mean-- in several cases --having to re-enter data, but so be it.
Any ideas what's going on with this? Is there a problem relating to El Capitan?
Follow-up.
I just discovered that I must have turned OFF the 3-minute destruct button at some point-- however, I also have the deep-six set for quitting and login, so they should NOT have been there. (I have quit Safari and relaunched it several times in the last couple of days; as well as rebooted the entire laptop.)
Plus, I'm wondering why they didn't show up in Cookie proper...
Here are some details...
Cookie is 4.5.8
Safari is 10.0.1
Mac OS is 10.11.6
Any help appreciated!
I was wrong on a crucial detail. Safari shows all websites that have caches, local storage, or cookies. It's a HUGE number of them... a tad disturbing! The 342 sites must not have been all cookies and, thus, beyond Cookies' control!
Any suggestions on how to auto-delete them?
Well, I have multiple backups of com.sweetpproductions.SafariCookies.plist going back several years.
I tried copying over the most recent, as well as several from across different months this year, and one year+ ago...NONE of them restored the favorite cookies!
I think that I figured how Cookie and SC work-- that what happens is that they overwrite Safari's own Cookie list. So, the key here is NOT the .plist for SC or Cookie, but Safari's own Cookies.plist that had been deleted.
I'll try an older one, from last week, and see.
SUCCESS!
It seems to me that you absolutely need to have Cookie, on its first run, make a backup of Safari's Cookies somewhere and alert the user that it's available for a restore if needed. In fact, Cookie should have a button for "Restore Previous Favorites List" to cover all disasters. There always needs to be a fail-safe, backup. But just as central is for Cookie to automatically bring over the previously-- years worth--saved set of favorite cookies. Without that, the program creates all the frustration and hassles I've gone through-- and I'm a backer, supporter, and believer in Safari Cookies.
I also agree with several reviewers on the App Store who said that the interface and the language in the interface needs improving. The phrase "Configuring Unwanted Data" gets into double negative terrain linguistically when trying to decide whether to check or not check.
In any case, now that I've figured this out, I may even try Cookie again-- yes, I'm a glutton for punishment technically, but the promise is there and I'd like to see it work!
Thanks!
Hope you can fix whatever's going wrong with Cookie. It would be nice to handle all this stuff automatically.
Adding a feature whereby one could temporarily open up Google Analytics--to review Disqus comments on news stories and be able to comment as well--and then, just as quickly, close that off after posting--would be very helpful.
Oh, boy! Just deleted Cookie--and was very careful to delete only the Cookie and not the SafariCookie favorites .plist. Now after a restart, I've discovered that Safari Cookies lists my favorite domains, but every single one of them is 0 !! In other words, years of log-in data and cookies have been swept clean.
This is utterly dismaying. I truly cannot believe that this has occurred. It's one thing for a new program to not work properly, but it's quite another for it to destroy several years worth of accumulated data and effort!
All I can hope now is that my regular Carbon Copy Cloner backups contain a prior version of Safari Cookies favorites.plist.
Is that all that I need to restore things?
I hope that you can understand why I'm a very unhappy camper!
Russell, thanks again.
I had unchecked the 5 minute time, so something else was going on.
I also unchecked the automatic log-in, yet after a restart I was still having to enter user name and passwords at favorite sites. It's as if Cookie were still controlling Safari Cookies!
I've now deleted favorites.plist and will see how that goes. Thanks for the trouble-shooting.
It makes good sense for you to check out the Export/Import as transitioning to Cookie depends on it! I would think that some of your best market for Cookie would be those of us who supported Safari Cookies in the past!
My biggest problem is that all too many sites require Google Analytics to be turned on before one can post comments, etc.
Aargh! It did NOT work.
I would strongly recommend that you include a fail-safe way of quitting Cookie. Right now, it seems, once it's launched, the user is stuck with it!
My deletion of favorites, of course, come to think of it, means that I have no favorites-- which means that I have to go through all the log-in stuff.
How do I uninstall this? I'm sorry to bring that up again, but it is really interfering with my browsing! I'm going to stick with Safari Cookies and continue to do my deletion of cookies--manually--several times during my browsing sessions.
The ultimate irony-- I wanted to update you on my latest effort to trouble-shoot this, but I couldn't log in to the web site here because of Cookie!
In any event, I tried Import from Bookmarks! Big mistake. I ended up with 2,092 favorites and cannot delete them.
I selected all and clicked Remove. All still there. I selected all and pressed the Delete key. Still there.
Then, I tried selecting an individual domain and clicking remove. Still, no dice. I even tried clicking a check box next to a domain name--it refused to take it. They are all dashes and remain that way-- cannot check them, cannot uncheck them.
I even re-ran the Set up Wizard, this time importing the favorites I had saved earlier.
Alas, still 2,092. I'm going to later try re-booting the Mac (I have log-in Cookie unselected) and see if that helps.
Hope you can trouble-shoot this. It's getting to be a drag having to enter my user name and password for every site I visit-- every time! :rolleyes:
Russell, appreciate the help!
That is easy, but I would definitely suggest
Making the transfer automatic
Having a button for Export/Import in both programs.
If SC is now dead-ended (i.e. no further revisions), then at least an Import Favorites button in Cookie (which could pop up an explanation of what to do in SC) would a big help.
That would be smart to add in any case, so that people would know how to do the import in case the automatic transfer doesn't work.
Now, alas, when I did it, it did not work! It brought in only a couple of sites, none of which are my favorites! The Export Favorites message in Safari Cookies also says "Cookies will not be exported" which would seem to defeat the purpose!
I just tried it again, this time saving the cookies to the desktop, but on import, there were NONE! I think it's confusing itself! :rolleyes:
At this point, at least temporarily, I'd like to disable Cookie because it keeps blocking my auto signing into my favorite sites. How would I do that?
Absolutely love Safari Cookies and want to upgrade--and support you and Cookie. But the question that Joe posted here goes right to the heart of usability!
There needs to be a way of automatically importing Safari Cookies favorites during the Set Up procedure. The Import/Export button is a dead end! Safari Cookies, at least the version I have (the latest I believe, 1.9.2), has no obvious way of exporting cookies!
Purely from a user-friendly (and business!) standpoint, this process needs to be transparent, if not automatic. Otherwise, you simply end up with frustrated users who will abandon the program during the trial.
As it now stands, when I look at my running Cookie, it has no cookies whatsoever. This is odd as, at one point, soon after I installed it, it had brought into it all my favorites from SC! Now, without any cookies, I'm being forced to re-log into all my favorite sites. A major nuisance!
I hope that my tone in writing this isn't too blunt or harsh. I do not mean to be (it's hard sometimes to convey tone in Internet writing). I really like the plug-in and am looking forward to trying this out. The notion of having continuous monitoring is a great one-- along with instant deletion of tracking cookies (or, at least, soon, within a minute).
One other question.
Even as I'm trying to use Cookie in this odd state, I find that it instantly deletes ALL cookies, meaning that I don't even have time to mark cookies as favorites!
I have the delete time set to 5 minutes, but I can literally watch them appear and disappear in seconds!
Hope you have some ideas about how to fix that, too!
Thanks!