Answer
# 2 |
Disabling Cookies This is probably the easiest area of
cookie testing. What happens to the web site if all cookies
are disabled? Start by closing all instances of your
browser and deleting all cookies from your PC set by the
site under test. The cookie file is kept open by the
browser while it’s running, so you must close the browser
to delete the cookies. Closing the browser also removes any
per-session cookies in memory. Disable all cookies and
attempt to use the site’s major features and functions.
Most of the time, you will find that these don’t work,
since cookies are disabled. This isn’t a bug, but rather a
fact of life: disabling cookies on a site that requires
cookies (of course!) disables the site’s functionality.
With cookies disabled, your testing job is somewhat
reduced. Is it obvious to the website user that he must
have cookies enabled to use the site? Is the Web server
recognizing that its attempts to set cookies are failing?
If so, does it send a page to the user stating, in plain
language, that cookies must be enabled for the site to
work? Or, can the user frustratingly attempt the same
operation many times in a row without a clue as to why the
site isn’t working? Amazon.com passes this test with flying
colors. I was able to use all major aspects of the site –
searching, shopping cart, checkout functions – even though
cookies were completely disabled. I’d bet that state
maintenance was being taken care of server-side, based on
the session ID at the end of the home page URL. Let’s test
this hypothesis. The home page URL was
www.amazon.com/…/home.html/104-0274809-0482344. If I change
the rightmost digit from 4 to 5 and repost the URL, Amazon
discards my edited URL and “recovers” from the corruption
by creating a URL with a new session ID,
www.amazon.com/…/home.html/107-0357560-1728507. So, it
appears that the hypothesis is correct.
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| Amitjain
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