Certain websites I visit frequently for work almost never work until I delete all of the cookies from my browser. They don’t work without cookies allowed, and yet it appears that their website is broken by their own cookies.
What the fuck?!
What am I misunderstanding here?
That the backend code for the site in question was written by competent people.
Generally when this happens it’s due to some kind of session information in the cookie being mangled by the bugs on the server and sent back to the client (your browser). Sometimes it’s client-side Javascript that does the mangling. Either way, the next time the cookie is sent back to the server, the data is corrupt and the server barfs.
Bad testing and QA. That sort of thing should be caught before it makes it out in the wild.
So you’re saying I should hit “send” on that email I already typed out to Wiley-Blackwell blasting their crappy website?
Sites upgrade all the time. Sometimes switching to a new provider. And so on.
Cookies that used to work for the old version cause problems for the new one. So it’s delete cookies time. Nevermind that this is something one person at their end could have handled properly vs. thousands of irate users.
It’s also remarkably common that sites just don’t handle older cookies well even if nothing has changed in the meantime.
Throw in all the ways different browsers handle cookies and it gets really messy. Even different versions of the same browser can be incompatible in some small way.
Even major sites sometimes get caught this way.
Google, for example. I sometimes Google for things where the majority of the hits are in French. This is expected and not the problem. My French isn’t all that great, so I often try Google’s offer of a link to its translation service for these pages. Sometimes it works, but after a few times, it’ll misbehave.* It’ll start saying that my client misconfigured its request or something like that. And once it starts doing that, it’ll continue until I reboot my computer. I wasn’t sure what caused the problem, but, thinking about it, cookies are the likely culprit.