Nope, this is not about flight duration analysis for those little buggers. The title rather comes from a statement that “[the user has] a rather old Firefox profile…”.
The complaint was that, when manually removing cookies from the Firefox cookie jar, the corresponding sites automatically were put on the cookie site block list. This was observed with a number of previous Firefox versions, the current one being “30.0”. But in the “Preferences” – “Privacy” menu, no special setting could be seen that would explain this behavior, nor anywhere else in the menus. No plug-in was installed that would cause this, so what’s it all about?
A closer look at the Firefox profile settings revealed quite a few user-defined settings related to cookie handling. One caught the eye:
network.cookie.blockFutureCookies user-set boolean true
Reseting this preference to it’s default value (or setting it to “false”) immediately re-established the desired behavior: Deleting a cookie would no longer add the host to the cookie “Exceptions” list, set to “block”.
A friend pointed out that this setting probably goes back to…. Firefox version 1.5! As you can see in this Mozilla’s Bugzilla entry from July 2006, users asked to get back the check box to set this feature, which was dropped around FF 1.5. So most probably, the preference setting from the user profile was set with a Firefox 1.x browser version and then left untouched – with this feature actually working until even today, FF version 30.0 from 2014. Now that’s what I would call an “rather old profile”!
It seems there are quite some folks who’d still like to have the check box back. Maybe it’d help them that, instead they can add above preference variable to their profile, once, and are all set.