[woojoo666]

There are many different yet legitimate uses for cookies. It's impractical to expect the user to sift through to find the ones that are necessary and the ones that aren't. Even if the browser requests them beforehand, how is the user supposed to know if the request is for a marketing cookie or functional cookie.

> That's kind of the point. By making it all transparent and seamless browser makers played into the hand of marketing companies. If cookies had a cost and would degrade the user experience, they might be thinking twice before putting hundreds of them on a site.

Cookies do have a cost, namely the bad PR from people complaining about the unnecessary tracking cookies. If you think that's not enough, then you are free to reject cookies as well to degrade your own experience. But they aren't mutually exclusive. Complaints and bad PR can also drive users away from the site and enact change.

[grumbel]

For cookies to have a cost they would need to be visible first. Brave does that right, by not only blocking lots of them out of the box, but also by showing you how many it blocked straight in the address bar, without any extra clicks. Firefox in contrast doesn't do that. It doesn't even give an easy way to inspect the cookies, it just has a "Clear cookies and site data" button that doesn't even tell you what it has stored or what it is going to delete.

Simply put, browser could to a lot better job at preventing this.

As for legitimate use, I don't really see much. Login handling is the obvious one, but I'd argue that login handling itself is in dire need of a rework and should be handled by a proper Web standard, not site specific hacks and "Save password" guesswork.

[woojoo666]

That's fair, I would love for browsers to give more transparency on the tracking front.

As for legitimate use cases, I think shopping carts on most online marketplaces use cookies.