Re: [http-state] Ticket 5: Cookie ordering

Dan Witte <dwitte@mozilla.com> Sat, 06 February 2010 00:03 UTC

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Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:04:35 -0800
From: Dan Witte <dwitte@mozilla.com>
To: yngve@opera.com
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Subject: Re: [http-state] Ticket 5: Cookie ordering
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----- "Yngve Nysaeter Pettersen" <yngve@opera.com> wrote:

> IOW, if ordering is determined by anything but the domain and path the
>  
> sequence of cookie is going to vary depending on which servers the
> clients  
> visits and the sequence it visits them, and this might cause
> significant  
> problems for a server that considers ordering significant.

Indeed. In Firefox, we sort by path length and then creation time. I can't comment as to whether sites depend on it now, but at one point we did drop the creation time sort - and sites broke. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236772 has some details.

We also found that creation time should be persisted when cookies are modified. I don't have a bug reference handy for this one, but it could be dug up.

I like the idea of ordering by domain. Ultimately, having this stuff in a more storage-esque API where domain and path info are available in the Cookie header, or document.cookie, would make this much less of an issue...

Regards,
Dan.