Hello,

Cokoies are mainly used to keep track of all the data, and it is shown that you used websites (eg. facebook) less than a day ago, at which point they store data to keep everything relevant (to my knowledge), and to track activity. However, if you want to make it just take up less space because storage space is a problem, then you can enable Firefox to delete cookies when closing.

Settings > Privacy & Security > Cookies and Site Data > Clear Data (manual clear) In same Privacy & Security panel, check the box for Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed to automate deletion.

Yes, I totally understand how they work and what they're for. I have worked online for over 27+ years, so very familiar... but that's also the point.

They *never* used to fill up that fast. It would take like a week before Facebook cookies would hit 30mb... now it's hitting 50-70 in a day - and I wasn't even on it.

If I tell it to delete when I close it - I will have to log in every single time, do the code reset blah blah blah, which is a pain for the times I do go onto it.

My simple point was, cookies used to be handled better that they didn't stay persistently like this - they did - not this badly. (And it's not just Facebook, that's just the worst offender).

If firefox has this setting in place, "Balanced for protection and performance. Pages will load normally. Firefox blocks the following: Social media trackers Cross-site cookies in all windows Tracking content in Private Windows Cryptominers Fingerprinters"

it's definitely NOT blocking these things, if it's filling up like crazy. Why? Why is it not blocking all this extra stuff?

That's my question.

(Years ago we could actually view info on the cookies... now there's so much hidden, we can't see it)

Hello,

Cross site cookies and website cookies are quite different.

Cross site cookies block cookies from tracking you, and taking your data. For cookies, it is part of the functional part of the website that doesnt track you.

Sometimes, websites have lots of cookies to store preferences.

You're looking at two things at that panel: 1.) cookies — their count, and 2.) storage — the amount of locally stored data besides cookies (that otherwise have limited size).

So if you're concerned about the file size column, that's not related to cookies. That's rich app storage the things you use need to leave on the client side for performance etc. — check https://javascript.info/data-storage if you want to learn more about the two other types of storage besides cookies (localStorage/sessionStorage, and IndexedDB).

Why is that filling faster than before? Because apps are larger, more complex, users expect to interact with larger amounts of data with more instantaneous experience etc. — if these 100MB that Facebook has already available in your client locally were to be downloaded in every request or page load, the whole app would be seconds slower.

Is it coincidence that the worst offenders have generally the most bloat? … Right.

There are ways to inspect what data is stored in localStorage, in IndexedDB, vs. in caches, but as an end-user you probably won't have much success fiddling with that as it eventually will have the same effect as deleting the whole entry (logging sessions out, corrupting the data for a new storage etc.) — but these data structures attached to a particular page can be inspected, see the development docs: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/storage_inspector/local_storage_session_storage/ if you're just curious what's in the bloat the platforms store with you in the first place.