Re: Proposal: Cookie Priorities

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Thanks, Mike.

As I understand it, this is already implemented in one browser, which is good in that we're looking for implementation.

What do folks -- both other browser implementers and site folks -- think about this?

Regards,


> On 4 Mar 2016, at 2:58 AM, Mike West <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Way back in 2013, folks at Google put together a proposal for a `priority` attribute for cookies with the intent of allowing servers to influence a user agent's retention policy[1]. Chrome has been shipping this feature since ~November 2013[2], and Google servers have been using it since then. It would be lovely to get more feedback on the concept from other folks outside the company, so I've just submitted a copy/pasted version of the original proposal[3] as https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-west-cookie-priority-00. Apologies for the years of delay. :/
> 
> Like many other excitingly huge companies, Google has both internal and external servers hosted on subdomains of `google.com`, and employees hit the user agent's cookie retention limit on a regular basis. In order to insure that this doesn't result in lost sessions, Google marks certain cookies as `Priority=High`, and others as `Priority=Low`. As you might imagine, the latter are evicted more frequently than regular cookies, the former less frequently. The document describes how Chrome takes these priorities into account when evicting cookies from the cookie store. Anecdotally, folks internally have found it quite helpful in terms of retaining session state.
> 
> There's still some work to do to bring the document up to date with proposals like https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-cookie-alone-00 which also aim to alter the browser's eviction policy. I'm working through the implications of that document on this proposal in Chrome right now, and will document whatever merger we end up considering sane once we figure out what it it might be. :)
> 
> One of the original authors (Erik) has left Google, and I haven't been successful at getting in contact with him: I'm hopeful that we can get him involved again. Regardless, Samuel and I would be thrilled to hear what this group thinks of the proposal.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> [1]: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-dev/xK4IJ1-5oJE
> [2]: https://codereview.chromium.org/54303010
> [3]: https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/file/d/0B3o1IlTKoADVRllKWGlyWGxIVTg/edit
> 
> -mike

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/