Cookies and firefox

Question

Ive been trying to find out why when i create a cookie
firefox does not kill my cookie when i close my browser (im using
FF v 3.0.5).
In theory if one does not set the expiry param in cfcookie
tag the cookie should expire once i close my browser. This seems
the case on many browsers except Firefox. I realise FF has an
option which one is supposed to check so "private" data is cleared
when browser is closed, but this is not a default settings.
Regardless to that in FF settings > Privacy > cookie panel I
have the setting checked on, “accept cookies from
sites”, “accept third-party cookies” and
“keep until they expire”. This tells me my cookie will
die when they need to depending on the settings they have been
given, but this never happens.
In my mind this leaves a security issue, if one does not
change their default "clear my private data" setting and does not
logout from a site properly, it will leaves their account open for
any other person who goes to the same site.
For example, this site and many others sites, I didn’t
check “remember me” option when I logged in however, if
I close my FF browser (but not logout) and reopen it, I’m
already logged in!
Id appreciate any help in regards to how I can get the same
behaviour to work on FF without depending on one changing their
browser settings.

Answer 1

@Davelaws
What’s the reason with adding the period at the start of
mysite.com?
The
documentation
on cfcookie says so. I suppose it has to do with how Coldfusion
extracts the domain name from subdomains like warehouse.mysite.com,
accounts.mysite.com, personnel.mysite.com, and so on.
Here's something else you might wish to know. I saved the
following version of your code as
firefoxCookieTest.cfm.
<cfif isDefined("COOKIE.cookieIsLive")>
<cfoutput>COOKIE.cookieIsLive=#COOKIE.cookieIsLive#</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
COOKIE.cookieIsLive=NOT DEFINED
</cfif>
<cfcookie value="#now()#" name="cookieIsLive">
Open the page for the first time in Firefox 3.0.5, and you
will get:
COOKIE.cookieIsLive=NOT DEFINED
Refresh the page, and you will get something like:
COOKIE.cookieIsLive={ts '2008-12-27 04:59:53'}
Then close and re-open Firefox. When you run the page, you
will get:
COOKIE.cookieIsLive=NOT DEFINED as before.
With the page still open, follow the menu
Tools => Options => Privacy(tab) => Show
Cookies(button). Locate the domain from the list of sites.
Click on the + symbol to expand. You will see that the cookie file
is still there, even though Coldfusion doesn't currently have the
cookie in memory.