As a web developer, I actually don’t use cookies that often (mainly because I’m not interested in tracking users’ behavior). But I do need to use them occasionally, such as to remember when they’ve clicked the “X” to close a modal alert, so I don’t keep showing it to them on each new page they visit.

That’s what led me to today’s surprising discovery. My cookie wasn’t working properly, so I wanted to investigate a) whether or not it was actually being saved, and b) what data it was saving.

I work on a Mac, and Safari is my primary browser. But I already knew Safari doesn’t let you inspect the contents of cookies, so I fired up Chrome, which is my go-to for testing anything that I can’t test with Safari. I know Chrome always used to let you inspect the contents of cookies, so imagine my surprise today when I discovered that, at some point fairly recently, Chrome apparently removed that capability. You can still see which sites have stored cookies, and how many, but you can’t investigate the details any further than that. Seriously??

Next I tried Firefox. Nope, same.

At this point I was highly dubious that the fourth browser in my testing queue would handle things any differently, but I had no alternative, so I reached for that rarely-clicked-upon blue-green swirl icon in my Dock, loaded my page in Microsoft Edge, and… what do you know, Edge does still let you inspect the exact contents of stored cookies.

But for how long?

Anyway… for now, I have a justification for keeping Edge installed on my Mac.