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by ratata 1744 days ago
Just fyi, you can delete individual cookies in the developer tools.
2 comments

> Just fyi, you can delete individual cookies in the developer tools.

While I very much agree with the point you're making, I can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the number of family members I have who know what the developer tools even are, and that's because I showed them when troubleshooting an issue they were having. They aren't going to learn or remember how to access the dev tools to manage cookies, but they do know what it means to delete individual cookies and the current process to do so, and if they forget the exact steps they could certainly figure it out in settings/preferences.

What they're not going to do is think "well, I can't find the thing I used to use to deal with cookies, I'd better go muck around in the developer tools." I'd imagine a very large percentage of non-technical people who have heard about cookies fall into the same category as my relatives, but that's my own bias talking and YMMV of course.

If they're a non-developer, the ability to clear all of the cookies (or data) for a given site should be adequate to cover their needs (and if they're a developer, obviously they'll just use Developer Tools > Application for individual cookie manipulation).

If a non-developer is in a situation where they need to delete a single cookie by name but deleting _all_ of that site's cookies would be ruinous for some reason, then something's horribly wrong.

Read the parent answer, it explains when deleting individual cookies is useful (even for non-devs)
Not really? Cookie names/values are usually inscrutable to anyone who hasn't worked on the site in question, and the idea that a non-developer would need to selectively delete individual cookies to work around a bug in a site is just silly (those users are much better served by simply clearing all of that site's cookies and logging in again).

(And when the need truly does arise, there's a perfectly-good tool for that which is no harder to find than the sub-menu being deprecated.)

I have never known anyone to need to delete an individual cookie vs all for a site. Certainly I've never needed that.

Only time I have (probably ever) deleted an individual cookie was for testing during development, and in those cases I already use the dev tools to do so.

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