See Full Cookie Details in Safari 5.1

How-To

John Martellaro

3:15 PM, Jul. 25th ET, 2011

Articles by Author John Martellaro on Twitter Contact Author Bio

Comments (5)

Safari 5.1, which is available for both Snow Leopard and Lion, changes the amount of cookie detail we can see in its Preferences. Here’s how to see all the details that were formerly available in Safari 5.0.5.

In Safari 5.0.5, if you looked at your (HTTP) cookies with: Safari Preferences -> Security -> Show Cookies, you’d see something like this:

Cookies in Safari 5.0.5

Cookie Detail in Safari 5.0.5

However, Apple has, to put it politely, dumbed-down the display of cookies in Safari 5.1. If you select: Safari Preferences -> Privacy -> (Cookies and other website data:) -> Details, you’ll see a newly modified display.

Cookies in Safari 5.1

Cookie (abbreviated) detail in Safari 5.1

To recover the ability to see the original cookie detail, do the following:

Go to Safari Preferences -> Advanced.
At the bottom, check “Show Developer Menu in Menubar.”
If necessary, visit the site for which you want to view the cookies.
In Safari’s Developer menu, select “Show Web Inspector.”
Select the “Resources” tab at the top and expand the “Cookies” disclosure triangle. Then select the site of interest to see the cookie details.

Safari Web Developer Inspector

Developer Web Inspector

Here’s what the result looks like on my Mac for Apple’s website.

Safari Web Developer Inspector

Recovered Cookie detail

If you select a row and click the “X” at the bottom of the main pane, you can selectively delete individual cookies. This is the same data that was shown in Safari 5.0.5, but the columns have been reordered sligtly.

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Thanks and props to TMO’s Webmaster, Adam Christianson, for discovering this technique.

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5 Observer Comments

Lee Dronick

said on July 25th, 2011 at 3:09 PM (Edited: 10/18/2011 6:20 PM):

Cookie settings seem to be a problem. If you have Block Cookies set to Always then it seem that cookies are not actually blocked, unless you have Private Browsing turned on. If you are running Private Browsing turned on then you can not post to websites even if you have previously accepted and not deleted the website cookie.

Nemo

said on July 25th, 2011 at 3:47 PM:

Because of Safari’s poor privacy protections, I’ve given up on it and gone with Firefox with its preferences property configured and with the BetterPrivacy, Noscript, Cookie Monster, and Ghostery extension installed. While Firefox with these extension installed does require a bit of managing for certain websites, nothing comes close to blocking unwanted tracking, the running of unwanted scripts, and/or the installation on web bugs and flash cookies.

tammythemongoose said on July 25th, 2011 at 5:47 PM:

This was very interesting. I have Safari 5.1 but and I saw the new cookies but when I clicked the X as shown in the red area under the recovered cookie detail screen shot, nothing seemed to happen.

Was something supposed to happen? I could not tell if the cookies were deleted!
Also, under the dumb down screen, could some one help me understand what it means under each website where we see words like:

(this is what I see)
Cache
Local Storage
Plug-in (and this one was in PBS.org and know they don’t “do” a plug in!)
Cookies

Those were all the types I saw but I have no idea what they mean next to a website.

THANKS A BUNCH!!

Serena said on August 3rd, 2011 at 7:42 AM:

This works for the website you just opened in your browser.
However, if I wanted to see the full details of ALL cookies that are saved, what do I do then?

John Martellaro said on August 3rd, 2011 at 4:25 PM:

Serena: As you visit more and more sites, the URL for those sites will appear under the “Cookies” heading in the sidebar. Select the site name/URL to see the cookies for each one.

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