What is CookiePie?
- CookiePie is a Firefox®/Flock®/GNU IceWeasel® extension that enables you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows.
- How I can obtain and use it?
- Download it freely from this CookiePie Extension link.
- Use the tab's context menu to enable CookiePie.
- For example: Toogle CookiePie on in two tabs, and login to different GMail® accounts in each one.
- Where the idea came from?
- We needed to use it internally at Nektra, and finally we decided to publish it for the community.
- What does CookiePie mean for the end user?
- It means that you can open multiple GMail®/Yahoo Mail®/Hotmail® accounts in different tabs and windows simultaneously.
- What does CookiePie mean for web developers?
- Developers working on Web Software supporting multiple users or profiles can use CookiePie to simultaneously test their software with each user without needing to open a different browser.
- How CookiePie was made?
- A first look at the Firefox® extensions capabilities made us think that this extension was almost impossible to do. One of the limitations was the unconnected parts between http transactions and the UI, being difficult to correlate an UI to a specific http request/response, specially when AJAX/XmlHttpRequest (i.e: GMail®) is involved.
- The work involved mainly short term research and the effort to push Firefox® capabilities to the extreme, knowing nothing about Mozilla®'s Extensions at the beginning of development.
- What are the current known limitations:
- Gecko 1.8.1 has some implementation errors: Firefox® stores cookies although our http observer changes the response header. This means that the common cookies are changed in the Firefox® extensions for every transaction on each tab. More information at Mozilla Bugzilla.
- The reordering of tabs is breaking tabs with GMail® accounts opened.
- GMail® has added, after we finished this extension, an alert we hope to repair, to make GMail® unaware about another connections on another tabs or windows.
- User may experience problems with another Firefox® extensions (e.g.: Tab Mix Plus).
- What are the features we would like to have in the future?
- Those requested on the feedback of the users.
- Complete Cookie commitment to security standards.
- Compatibility with another extensions.
- Configuration options:
- CookiePie enabled by default.
- Cookies inheritance checkbox: If a user opens a new tab/window from a CookiePie tab, the new opened tab would inherit the cookie container.
- Cookie pipeline handling: To choose which cookies need to be individualized and which cookies need to be used from the Firefox container.
- Persist/Save/Load tabs with cookies.
- Improved and cleaner code.
- Testing in complex scenarios.
- What we suggest for future versions of Firefox®?
- We suggest to have this capability embedded natively on Firefox and not as a third party addin. We know this will involve changing relations between objects in Firefox, but we consider it's an obvious step to do in the browser war.
- Which platforms are supported?
- Currently it runs on Windows® and Linux. We need to check why Mac® is not supported because this software is standard JS code, not platform dependant.
