Labs/Test Pilot/Test Proposals/Cookies
Cookies Study
- Champion: LWChris (lwchris@gmx.de)
- Status: Draft
- Duration: To be discussed
Introduction
Cookies are widely used, their use is spread all over the web and they are frequent topic of discussions about safety, privacy and related stuff. Many pages use multiple of them, many to identify a user, some for tracing activities, and yet others use cookies as domain-wide storage for settings and preferences. There are several add-ons related to cookie management, and as we all know, Firefox unfortunately is a bit "poorly" equipped regarding its cookie management options: functions like Delete none or all and domain wide cookie blocking are not an option anymore in times of cookies being both a blessing and a curse.
Goals
I want to draw a clearer image of how and how frequently cookies are used and whether some or all of them are wanted or not. I hope Firefox's future cookie management can be more effective and considerably enhanced. I think for example of features to exclude certain cookies from deletion (to keep session cookies, preferences and tokens), as well as an option to prohibit to save a cookie only by its name (for example to block common tracing cookies), or blocking only certain cookies from a domain (block tracing cookies, but allow session cookies).
Data to be collected from every user
- Does the user use any cookie-managing add-ons? (list to be done)
- If so, which preferences did the user set?
- What is the user's preference regarding cookie deletion?
- How many cookies does the user have?
- Does the user clear them by default, add-on, or manually, or not at all?
- How many domains does the user have cookies of?
- How many cookies does the user have per domain (max and avg)
- How many cookies does the user have before deletion?
Maybe, these questions are interesting, too:
- What is the highest count of identically named cookies?
- What datatype is stored in the cookies: string, integer, boolean?
- How long do the cookies persist before deletion? ([min,] max, avg)
(Some more?)
As a matter of privacy, domains and cookies' names/contents are not to be submitted to Test Pilot, only numbers, settings or durations.