Magento cookie bug with WebKit based browsers

Question

There is a reasonably common & well documented cookie-related bug/issue with Magento and Chrome (looking at the others' issues - possibly WebKit and IE at times). Whether this is due to a common Chrome extension/setting or incorrect web server setting - I do not know.

I'm on OS X 10.8.2 running CentOS 5.8 via VirtualBox. More often than not, for me to login to a Magento admin, I need to set the HTTP Only setting in the Magento admin to 'No'. Before I do this, I am not able to login via Chrome - other browsers do not seem to have this issue for me.

Now I've come across a new (but probably the same) issue while making an extension - I am able to read cookies via Chrome but not set them. There were no issues with using Firefox. To make sure it's not my Chrome, I've performed a fresh install by deleting all user data and profiles but the issue persists. Perhaps I should set the cookies via JS only for this extension.

Nothing out of the norm with the cookie setting code:

$cookie = Mage::getModel('core/cookie');
$cookie->set('cookiename','cookievalue',99999);

Answer 1

Don't develop using localhost as your domain name. I typically use apache to setup a fake custom site at a domain like magento.dev, and then add

127.0.0.1    magento.dev

to my hosts file. Beyond working around the cookie problem, this also lets me have an infinite number of sites running locally.

Answer 2

Is your server time and computer time correct? This causes the majority of cookie issues with Webkit based browsers - whereas IE and FF are far more tolerant (ignorant).

Answer 3

Turns out that Chrome interprets your custom web address differently from other browsers. I had a custom top level domain for my local installations but when this was changed to .com the issue was resolved and now it's set as .local (I was using .fk previously)