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The forgotten cost of Firefox: cookie mgmt

I’ve been a Mozilla devotée since 1999, and was slow to come over to Firefox. I like Firefox, but this Silicon Beat piece on the “problem” of users rejecting cookies today just jogged my mind. I’m not longer prompted to accept cookies. I recloned a couple weeks ago to fix a bluetooth problem, and realized I hadn’t customized that part of the browser. Today I rediscover that Firefox is much more limited in how you can control cookies (something that surprises me each time I learn it). What a pain, and so hard to understand. Is it a “feature” or is it just part of Firefox’s original misssion of being a stripped down, fast version of Mozilla?

As a user of what’s now the flagship product of the Mozilla family, all I know is I just deleted a quantity of cookies that makes me feel positively unclean. And it’s very clumsy to maintain that state. I deleted by accident a cookie for Bloglines (with “don’t allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies” checked) and was unable to log back in. I had to go to “manage cookies” and delete Bloglines from the list of Exceptions (it was marked as “Block”). Phew! What else will I have to do that for just to get rid of the Zedo, Hitbox and all that other junk?

The full Mozilla suite has a much richer set of tools to manage cookies. I miss the “ask me before accepting all cookies” option, almost enough to go back to the full suite.

As it is with Firefox, it’s almost easier to track what sites I’ve viewed via my cookies than in my damn history - given all this residue! I’ve been to many of these sites just once, and there they site in my cookies! Horrible.

Where is the value for me? I’ll accept cookies if they are linked to login info, or customization that I explicitly create. But otherwise they’re just bugs. I’m willing to explicitly subscribe to feeds and make that data public, but site-based cookies that simply report repeat visitor trends drive no value for me. I know site stats are important to owners, and that this is data they crave, but the no-tangible-value-for-me of this chafes.

Back to the question of Mozilla Suite vs Firefox+Thunderbird, I remain curious: are Firefox+Thunderbird more memory efficient than the full Moz suite? Are they optimized for standalone use, or meant to be used together?

Updated: Hit publish too soon.
Updated: I also have this piece open in another tab on web analytics, journalism and pr from earlier this year. One of the my feeds linked to it (when I have my Firefox tracker, I’ll know who it was). This shows another piece of the puzzle, the back end mining that goes on behind the scenes. I don’t mean to be naive and say that there shouldn’t be advertising on the web, but rather to push for a technological solution that creates value for me as user. And no, I’m sorry, receiving more pertinent (targeted) advertising is not a value I experience, except when I am in shopping mode.

Maybe there should be a browser button to click to denote when I am open to deals being offered?