I'd be interested to know what percentage of sites would actually lose functionality.
At a crude estimate, >90% of the sites that show me cookie warnings do everything I actually want them to statelessly. And I have some backup for that, because when I block cookies by default very few sites actually seem to get worse.
Are there clever user-aiding tricks with cookies that I don't realize I'm losing? Or is the average site with cookies purely for tracking and advertising?
(This is all a separate question from "should cookies be blocked by default"; I know a few uses really do suffer badly.)
True, and logins (along with browser games) leap to mind as the most widespread issue with general cookie-blocking.
But I probably sign into <5% of sites I visit, and even many of those are actively user-hostile, like Quora. I understand why Quora wants me to sign in, but from my end of things it's no more worthwhile than being asked to sign into Wikipedia just to read articles.
Broadly, I guess this is a gripe about how my web-use experience has become fundamentally adversarial. Cookies are one of many perfectly reasonable features which I cripple or disable even on respectable top-100 sites because they're used almost exclusively against my interests, but I'm not sure there's a good tech-level fix to that for users in general.
Sure, but I do not log in to the vast majority of the websites that I visit, and cookies aren't required for them to function properly unless I choose ('opt in') to log in.
Exactly. No one -has- to add a cookie that tracks you across sites they don’t even own. They can easily be used for authentication and session management without scraping a bunch of personal information from every visitor, logged in or not
At a crude estimate, >90% of the sites that show me cookie warnings do everything I actually want them to statelessly. And I have some backup for that, because when I block cookies by default very few sites actually seem to get worse.
Are there clever user-aiding tricks with cookies that I don't realize I'm losing? Or is the average site with cookies purely for tracking and advertising?
(This is all a separate question from "should cookies be blocked by default"; I know a few uses really do suffer badly.)