I have the latest and greatest Firefox installed on my Vista laptop. Lately, it has developed the habit of forgetting all its cookies when it is closed. My home page is My Yahoo! and I have to re-log in every time. I have to log in for SDMB and every other board I read. It doesn’t even remember the CNN edition I prefer. I have the browser set to accept cookies. This is a recent development. All I can think to do is uninstall and reinstall Firefox, but I would prefer not to go to the trouble.
Anyone have any idea why Firefox would suddenly decide to toss my cookies?
Check your Tools -> Clear Private Data options and make sure cookies aren’t check. Also, did you recently install any extensions, especially cookie-related ones?
Yeah, thought of those things. It is set to accept cookies. Clear Private Data when exiting is unchecked. Even if it were checked, cookies is unchecked, so they shouldn’t go away.
I have the same problem. Cookies disappear regularly. I haven’t figured out why or even a pattern. Some times it will go a week or more, some times just a few days and yesterday I seemed to loose them several times.
This may be way too obvious, but nobody’s mentioned it yet: In Tools|Options|Privacy, make sure you have cookies set to “Keep until they expire”, not “Keep until I close Firefox”
Go to Start and in the search box, type: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
This will bring up a profile. Open that profile. Find the cookies.sqlite file and delete it. Firefox will need to be closed before deleting it. Reopen Firefox and log into SDMB or whatever. Remember to put a checkmark in the “Remember Me” box. Close Firefox and restart it to see if the problem is solved.
I am tentatively saying that this has solved my problem. The cookies file somehow became corrupted.
For those who are interested in seeing how all this stuff is stored, and who would like to be able to manage it a bit more closely, you can install the SQLite Manager addon for Firefox.
For those who don’t know, basically many of Firefox’s internals are stored in, and controlled by, a database system. For example, the file cookies.sqlite is a little database that stores the information about each cookie. There are others for downloads, permissions, search, bookmarks, etc.
With the SQLite Manager, you can view these databases, and delete (or add) entries. You can also delete the whole database, in cases where it has become corrupted. Just be careful you don’t mess around too much if you’re not sure what you’re doing, or you could end up deleting all your cookies, or your bookmarks, or something like that.
Forgive me for posting this in your thread, Drum God, but I was having a similar issue where certain pages do not refresh on each visit, especially news sites.
Have any of you run into this? Is there a solution (besides F5 every time I go to the site)? I did change the about:config setting to always refresh on every load, but that seems to make the pages take longer to open.
