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by useragent86 2366 days ago
Another site that shows a completely blank page when first-party cookies are disabled.

It seems like an epidemic lately. So much JS in the wild just stops cold when some cookie or LocalStorage permission isn't available, and that failure prevents some other JS from running that unhides the page or runs a CSS transition. It doesn't seem like long ago when most sites at least showed some content when cookies were disabled, but that's beginning to feel like the exception.
1 comments
huhtenberg 2366 days ago
Expecting first-party cookies to work is a reasonable assumption on site's developers part. Blocking these is rarely well-justified, so supporting this case is largely pointless.

Session cookies is a perfectly fine option that eliminates the need to pass the session id in each every URL. Sticky cookies are also something that most people will actually want because it helps improving the UX on the site on return visits. If you don't want either, in principle, clear them. This can be trivially automated in a wide variety of ways.

* That said, I agree that the site rendering shouldn't depend on the cookie access. But it's almost certainly an oversight of not testing for a marginal case that vanishingly few people have. So loudly moaning about it looks very odd - you are complaining about something that nobody needs. Just like a website not rendering well in Lynx.

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useragent86 2366 days ago
Not all browsers, on all devices, make it trivial to set cookie permissions so flexibly. And, as I said, it's not just about cookies, but also about LocalStorage and such APIs--which, historically, if not presently, do not always behave as desired with regard to clearing data. Forgive me for not wanting to grant all sites the permission to use them automatically.

I'm sure that, to many such webmasters (may I use that term?), I am indeed a nobody. Still, the Web is worse for it--a significant regression in usability and compatibility. Feel free to ignore my "loud moaning"--maybe the OP will appreciate the bug report.

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huhtenberg 2366 days ago
A bug report would've said - The site doesn't render if the first-class cookies are disabled.

The way you phrased it was different, both in spirit and in intent. Hence the "moaning" qualifier.

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