cookie questions

powerhouse has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am using IE 6, on Windows 2000 professional.
I built a site using cookies and Apache::Session.
I have no problems on my computer with cookies.
My client, that I'm building the site for has IE 6 on Windows XP.
His computer is accepting the cookie, but not reading it, so it keeps putting a new one on it.
My Mothers computer is Windows ME, with IE 6.0
Hers did the same thing as my clients.

The other day, mine did it for a few hours, finally it fixed it self.
I've searched everywhere, and read as much as possible. Mostly about P3P.
The site does NOT have a P3P policy. Is this the main problem? Or could there be another problem. Like I said, it works fine for me 99% of the time. I've had that same problem about 3 times, and it seems to fix itself :o(

I just want to know if you fellow monks know of any OTHER problems IE6 might have with cookies? I read the W3C Site, I found it from 176684. Is there something besides P3P that is causing problems?
I'd appreciate any feedback you have

thx,
Richard

Comment on cookie questions

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: cookie questions by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 01, 2003 at 05:24 UTC
There is one bug that might relate your problem which I ran across, which I reported to Lincoln Stein but I don't know if he fixed. If you look in the source code to CGI::Cookie you will find a comment about Netscape sometimes sending a double cookie, with the first one being the right one. With IE 6, sometimes, I found that it would send a double cookie and the last one was right. Change \|\|= on the line following to = and see if that fixes IE 6 for you. (It will break old Netscapes, unless you want to do a browser detect, you can't reconcile the two behaviours.) No, I don't remember the exact circumstances that cause this misbehaviour, just that I looked at the behaviour, fixed my copy, and reported the bug. And Lincoln didn't seem convinced of the need for the change, but I was swamped and didn't follow up properly.	[reply]
Re: cookie questions (IE6 bugs) by tye (Sage) on Jul 01, 2003 at 14:55 UTC
Yes, IE6 will occasionally get into states where it doesn't do the right thing with cookies. The two modes that I notice the most often are IE6 silently ignoring cookies that it shouldn't and IE6 hanging when a cookie is requested (as if it is prompting you if you want to accept the cookie but forgot to display the dialogue box -- note that it is also easy to have IE6 appear like it is doing this when switching windows because the dialogue box simply gets hidden). Both of these are usually triggered by making changes to "Internet Options" and both are cleared up by restarting IE (which requires that all IE windows be closed). - tye	[reply]