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User profile for user: Brian P. Campbell
Brian P. Campbell Author
User level: Level 1
25 points

Cookies cleared constantly in Safari

I'm having an odd problem where my cookies seem to keep on being cleared in Safari. Sometimes this will happen when I quit and relaunch Safari, sometimes it will happen while I'm running Safari, and I've been able to find no pattern for when it happens. I'm on a laptop and frequently connect to various wireless networks, but that doesn't seem to be related to the problem. I do not have Private Browsing turned on, though I've tried turning it on and off again just to make sure it wasn't on. This did not happen in the Safari 3 beta that I was running on Tiger, as far as I know.

Does anyone have any idea why this would be happening? If not, do you have any ideas about good ways to figure out what's going on? So far, I haven't been able to find a pattern; my cookies just disappear sometimes. I don't usually notice right away, but I notice when I go to a site that I was previously logged in to, and suddenly I'm logged out.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 10, 2007 10:55 PM

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9 replies
User profile for user: Brian P. Campbell
Brian P. Campbell Author
User level: Level 1
25 points

Nov 11, 2007 2:04 PM in response to kongshuttle

Have you figured out any sort of pattern to why it's happening, or any way you can get it to happen again? If I had some sort of pattern, I might be able to investigate further (by triggering the bug and watching what happens to the file when it happens), but I just have no idea when it's happening or what might be causing it.
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User profile for user: Brian P. Campbell
Brian P. Campbell Author
User level: Level 1
25 points

Nov 12, 2007 2:58 AM in response to Brian P. Campbell

Well, it's not the solution, but it looks like one of the causes has been found:
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/apple/applehates_bugfilers.php

It turns out that the bug in Safari is triggered by... filing a bug report with Apple! There may be other sites that trigger the bug as well, but Apple's bug report website does it reliably any time you view a bug report that you have submitted.

Oh, and Time Machine makes a lovely way of working around the issue. Just do a "Back Up Now" before you use the bug reporter (under the Time Machine dock menu), and then restore your cookies file after Safari eats it (the file is in ~/Library/Cookies).

Message was edited by: Brian P. Campbell (add workaround)
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User profile for user: BobP1776
BobP1776
User level: Level 3
698 points

Dec 10, 2007 3:44 AM in response to particle

If you have .MAC "Sync" turned on, be aware that there have been reports of strange failures to maintain changes of various sorts (i.e., items put into the Dock mysteriously vanishing again from the Dock) that were cured by doing a Reset Sync Data in System Preferences / .MAC / Sync / Advanced

Apparently upgrading to Leopard can leave the Sync Data out of whack with what's on the .MAC servers.

This is a total shot in the dark since I don't think the Sync function is even supposed to be dealing with cookies. But since none of the obvious stuff seems to be working I'll throw it out there.
--Bob
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Cookies cleared constantly in Safari

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