[whatwg] Private browsing vs. Storage and Databases

Jeremy Orlow jorlow at google.com
Tue Apr 7 18:38:12 PDT 2009


On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Brady Eidson <beidson at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 7, 2009, at 6:24 PM, Jeremy Orlow wrote:
>
>  Both would lead to bizarre behavior where data that the application
>> thought was saved really wasn't.
>>
>> This matches up with how most private browsing sessions handle cookies,
>> right?  The data persists until the session is up (because some of the web
>> can't work correctly without them) but then they're deleted at the end.
>>
>
> I guess I'll raise this point yet again, as it's a favorite of mine...  ;)
>  Cookies are not expected to be persistent, and when space runs out for them
> and they're expired there is already no notification of that.  Any app
> writer that expected cookies to be a safe, persistent store of data or state
> was already playing with fire.


(Sorry.  I started that email, walked away a bit, and sent it before seeing
the torrent of responses.)

I still think it's a valid point that, whether or not the intention for
cookies, many web apps assume that they are not so volatile.  And, in
practice, this is generally a safe assumption.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20090407/ff1de5b4/attachment.htm>


More information about the whatwg mailing list