[whatwg] Worker and message port feedback

Jonas Sicking jonas at sicking.cc
Sat Mar 21 14:13:07 PDT 2009


On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Mar 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> document.cookies can't change in the middle of an execution. I.e. a
>> script like:
>>
>> a = document.cookie;
>> b = document.cookie;
>> alert(a === b);
>>
>> will always show 'true'.
>
> On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Drew Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Following up on this. I created two pages, one that tests cookies in a
>> loop, and one that sets cookies in a loop, and ran them in separate
>> windows in Firefox 3, IE7, and Chrome.
>>
>> Chrome and IE7 currently allow concurrent modification of
>> document.cookies (i.e. the test loop throws up an alert). Firefox does
>> not.
>
> I do not think there is a problem with providing self.cookie in workers,
> exposing the cookie of the script. However, currently there doesn't seem
> to be much support for this.
>
> What do other browser vendors think of this?
>
> Jonas, given the above information regarding IE's behaviour, do you still
> think that providing such an API in workers is a problem?

It's the vendors that have exposed their users to this inconsistency
that you should ask. Or maybe sites that use document.cookie a lot and
that have a lot of chrome or IE8 users. Though both of those browsers
might be too new to have received a lot of feedback regarding this.
Note that this is only really a problem on sites that modifies
document.cookie a lot, and where users have multiple tabs open to the
same site.

Personally I don't see how this couldn't be a problem. The only thing
that'd save us is that cookies are generally not heavily used. But I
bet there are sites out there that do use document.cookie a lot.

/ Jonas



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