Safari Cookies

Web app needs to set third-party cookie

[timster]

(This was originally posted in the Mac Webmaster forum, but got no response, so I'll try one more time here.)

Does anyone know of an option or plugin which will allow Safari to accept third party cookies from particular "trusted" web sites?

Or maybe something that gives Safari support for P3P?

Background:
For those who don't know, P3P is an old and little-used W3C standard which allows companies to publish how they promise they will/won't use web visitor data, in exchange for letting that site set third party cookies. Most browsers besides IE don't support it, or are dropping support for it.

That said, since one of the sites I work requires third party cookies for legitimate reasons, I'm looking for an option for using Safari without clicking "Accept all cookies."

[Tiny Clanger]

You can set the cookie policy on a site-by-site basis with PithHelmet, though doing what you want requires a bit of a fiddle: you have to set Safari to allow all cookies, then set PithHelmet's default to be "block third-party cookies". You can then set "use Safari cookie policy" for the site you want third-party cookies on.

[JAB Creations]

If I have the option I always block third party cookies. While I defend cookies as being misused by security software that can't find anything else I do feel the need to distance myself from being just another number for some marketing department.

That being said if the information is so important you would work with the other website and have them create a script to create the cookies at their end and allow your site to access the information somehow without going through the client.

In the past I have had problems getting HTTP queries to work correctly with Safari. I have also had issues setting cookies in Safari via JavaScript. Safari is like Opera in the way that there are still very obnoxious bugs that they just don't bother to get around to for an extensive amount of time.

- John

[timster]

Thanks very much for the replies. Yes, I had been eyeing Pith helmet, but my test Mac hasn't arrived yet. It's good to know it can be configured to work for this.