[q92z8oeif]

back in 1999 or so I did a small research to check cookie support on the main browsers at the time. There was a few odd ones, but mostly mozilla and IE4 were the big ones at the time.

The mozilla cookie spec used language like "up to" for everything. Microsoft released a copy of the specification on MSDN with all the "up to" replaced with "at least". So IE4+ would support urls "at least" 1000chars. cookies at least whatever-limit it was supposed to have. etc.

They basically one-upped mozilla by offering web devs infinite resources that would, by definition, break on any browser following mozilla sane specification. While, also by definition, supporting everything made under the mozilla specification.

And all the users and webmaster of that time are directly responsible for the privacy mess we are today. And sadly, they are repeating everything again by adopting GoogleChrome and it breakneck speed in setting "standards" that self-serve Google.

This standards trumping for convenience is the ultimate incarnation of embrace-extend-extinguish and we can't stop falling for it!

[jefftk]

All that's required for reliable tracking with cookies is a unique identifier (8 characters would be plenty) and no spec has had such a low limit.