Standard Mischief

Specifically this is against Snap.com’s cookie, but broadly I could subtitle this as Manipulating Brower Cookies in Firefox - 101 or something.

One of the more annoying things on teh tubes of ‘net nowadays is called Snap Preview. When you are on certain websites with this crap enabled, when you roll a mouse over a off-site link, a javascript program runs and pops up a pretty useless preview of the off-site website. The pop-up is too small to be useful, yet too large to be ignored.

I thought the world knew by now that any window that pops up, without me specifically clicking on anything to activate it, instantly gets classified as annoying, whether or not said window is actual spam. Tiny little helpful “tool tips” are the one exception.

There are several different ways to kill this annoyance, some better than others. You could disable javascript, but it’s useful for all kinds of things (like Google Maps). Here I’m going to give you Snap.com’s preferred method, with a twist.

Step one: Go to this page, scroll down until you see the yellow area.
Step two: click on the “Click here” link (underlined in red below).

This should set a cookie that gets sent back to Snap.com’s servers, informing them to not send me a pop-up. It seems, however, that the cookie they send only lasts one session, meaning I’d need to keep setting that cookie each time I started up Firefox. To keep it around a bit longer I need to use a Firefox extension called Add ‘n Edit Cookies That means that from here on out, you need to be using Firefox.

Note: While testing this procedure, I once got a cookie from Snap.com that did not expire at the end of my session. I have no idea why that happened, but I thought I’d let you know. If I could reliably reproduce that result, I could skip the Add ‘n Edit Cookies extension part. That would save a bit of work. Most of the cookies Snap.com sends me are session cookies.

Go follow the above link, and install Add ‘n Edit Cookies. While you are at it, you want to install CookieCuller too. We’ll need it later. Got it? Good, you will now need to exit and then reload Firefox, and after that, you’ll likely need to fetch that damn cookie again too.

Step three: Activate Add ‘n Edit Cookies by clicking on Tools::Cookie Editor. Click on the one cookie from Snap.com that’s called “spa”. Go ahead and ignore the other ones.

press the edit button that’s in the lower center

In the new window just opened, we need to now click on the “new expiration date” radio button and add some time to the life of that cookie. I added 20 years. Press save to dismiss the top window, and then close to dismiss the one below that.

We could stop right here, but if you have your browser set to “upchuck” cookies after every session (highly recommended) you will lose your magic cookie, no matter how much time you added. So I’m going to use another extension (called CookieCuller) to protect just the cookies I want to keep, and discard every other unprotected cookie.

Step four: Using CookieCuller, Tools::CookieCuller again we select the “spa” cookie.

Step five: Then we press Protect Cookie to protect only the “spa” cookie, and any other cookie we wish to keep around. I only keep cookies where I know what the purpose of the cookie is, and I feel the benefits outweigh any privacy disadvantages.

Under Tools::Extensions, right-click on the CookieCuller bar, and select preferences

Make sure that “delete cookies on startup” is checked.

Last step: Click on Edit::Preferences or Tools::Preferences (Win XP), select the Privacy icon at the top, and click on the Cookies tab, and make sure your setting are as shown below.

You are done! Please note that if you want to test your new no-snap cookie, you will need to mouse over a site other than Snap.com. It seems that even with the cookie, the pop-ups do pop-up on any Snap.com page.

Now for the disadvantages. Please to be donning teh tin-foil hat. Every time you go visit a site that uses Snap.com, a line appears in Snap.com’s referrer log. That’s not so terribly bad, because you never really gave Snap.com your mothers maiden name or your Social Security number, but they do know when and how often you visit a Snap.com enhanced crippled site, how often you upchuck the other cookies Snap.com sends you, your browser type and other data like that. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Snap.com’s Terms of Service will read in such a way that they presume to own all that data, and may do with it as they wish.

The other disadvantage is that beyond step two, you need to use Firefox and a few extensions. There may be other cookie manipulating tools on other browsers like Opera or Safari, but I don’t know anything about them.

If you liked this post, you may like another blog post where I show you how and why to zero out Google’s cookie.

This is not the way I block Snap.com’s crap, but it should hold you over for a day or so until I get the other methods up. I’ll also try to clarify anything if you leave me a comment.