I Hate Microsoft Windows

I haven't said that for a while, so I thought it was a good thing for getting this long-dormant blog going again.

What's my particular reason for saying it on this occasion? Internet Explorer and Cookies.

We've written some software that uses cookies to identify users who have logged in, and I wanted to actually look at the cookies to see exactly what it was doing.

How? Well, IE 8, at least, doesn't make that it obvious how you do that, but after a brief burst of Googling, I found the answer: go to the Tools menu, select "Internet Options", and in the "Browsing History" panel, select "Settings". You get a new window, entitled "Temporary Internet Files and History Settings", from which you select "View files". Not exactly obvious, but OK. And there, in amongst 99 assorted files, were a bunch of 10 with names that started cookie:. Super.

Except that none of those cookie files had been modified for weeks, and none of them were obviously related to the site I was working on.

Puzzled, I looked again at the "Temporary Internet Files and History Settings". One of the settings, "Current Location" was the name of a folder:
C:\Users\Robert\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\TemporaryInternetFiles\

Presumably, I thought, the name of the folder where my cookies (and other "Temporary Internet Files") were being stored. And when I looked in that folder, I indeed saw the same 99 files that Internet Explorer had shown me. And no sign of the cookie I actually wanted.

So I prodded about, and after a while tripped over another folder:
C:\Users\Robert\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies

Where I found 13 files that looked like cookies: 9 corresponding to the ones I had seen in The Other Place, plus a couple more that didn't correspond to anything, but that weren't the one I was looking for either.

But there was also a folder, named Low. And lo! In there, I found 98 further Cookie files! Including the one corresponding to the cookie I was looking for.

So when I looked in IE, it told me I had 9 cookies stored in one place.

But it was actually using cookies stored somewhere else, where it had almost 100!

I have long hated the way Microsoft, and Windows in particular, try to protect naive users (or, alternative, avoid putting off non-technical buyers) by hiding complexity, in such a way that turns the whole system into black magic.

But this surpasses their normal level of obfuscation. To explicitly say IE has 9 things stored in one place when it is actually using 98 things stored somewhere quite different, is not just "hiding complexity" -- it is confusing, and misleading users (perhaps dangerously).

This kind of thing just makes it more likely for people to find computers incomprehensible, and think they are beyond them.

And I think that is a nasty thing to do.


P.S. And I've just noticed that when I told IE to delete cookies, it deleted almost all of them from the "Other Place". Strangely, it left behind four that came from microsoft.com.