Chromium Browser (snap) Does Not Delete Cookies and Web Site Data When Being Closed

[Gunter Ohrner]

Ubuntu 20.04

$ uname -a
Linux Zweiblum 5.4.0-51-generic #56-Ubuntu SMP Mon Oct 5 14:28:49 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ snap info chromium
name: chromium
summary: Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome
publisher: Canonical✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/chromium
contact: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bugs?field.tag=snap
license: unset
description: |
  An open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all
  Internet users to experience the web.
commands:
  - chromium.chromedriver
  - chromium
snap-id: XKEcBqPM06H1Z7zGOdG5fbICuf8NWK5R
tracking: latest/stable
refresh-date: gestern um 18:33 CEST
channels:
  latest/stable: 86.0.4240.111 2020-10-21 (1362) 170MB -
  latest/candidate: 86.0.4240.111 2020-10-21 (1362) 170MB -
  latest/beta: 87.0.4280.20 2020-10-16 (1357) 172MB -
  latest/edge: 88.0.4292.2 2020-10-16 (1358) 173MB -
installed: 86.0.4240.111 (1362) 170MB -

I enabled "Cookies und Websitedaten beim Beenden von Chromium löschen" (Delete Cookies and Web Site Data when exiting Chromium).

Still, after quitting and restarting Chromium, the list of sites with stored Cookies and other information under "Alle Cookies und Websitedaten anzeigen" (Show all Cookies and Web Site Data) is huge.

I expect it to be empty after a restart, except for maybe some specific white-listed Cookies.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I am testing this in a VM, and the functionality appears to work for the most part: all my cookies were indeed deleted, except for one (www.nytimes.com), so there's something fishy indeed.

Do you have the "Preload pages for faster browsing and searching" option enabled (it is on by default)? This feature advertises that preloaded information can include cookies.

Also, is your previous browsing session being restored when you launch chromium? That would load all previously loaded pages, and thus most likely write cookies to disk.

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

Am 23.10.20 um 17:46 schrieb Olivier Tilloy:
> I am testing this in a VM, and the functionality appears to work for the
> most part: all my cookies were indeed deleted, except for one
> (www.nytimes.com), so there's something fishy indeed.
>
> Do you have the "Preload pages for faster browsing and searching" option
> enabled (it is on by default)? This feature advertises that preloaded
> information can include cookies.

No, I have not, it's disabled.

> Also, is your previous browsing session being restored when you launch
> chromium? That would load all previously loaded pages, and thus most
> likely write cookies to disk.

No, the browser window only shows the welcome page.

However I just checked it now after explicitly deleting cookies and
website data yesterday after reporting this.

I closed Chromium and restarted it. Currently, only cookies for
whitelisted domains seem to be stored, but I have "file system" data for
Amazon and several other domains listed - however, if I check details,
it says "0 bytes" for every entry I checked, so that's probably (?) ok.

So not sure how this huge list of cookies and all the other stuff ended
up in Chromium and was only deleted after manually requesting deletion
of the web site data.

This isn't necessarily even related to the snap migration, I think.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Indeed, that smells more like an upstream bug. Would you mind filing it at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list, and sharing the link to it here?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

MikeV, can you describe more precisely what you mean with "not working" in the duplicate bug report? How did you ascertain this? Were all or only a handful of cookies still present after restarting Chromium?

Can you start Chromium in the command line with 'chromium --enable-logging=stderr &> chr.log', close it as you normally do and then attach the result here?