IE, cookies and localhost

I was testing the detecting of disabled cookies today, and discovered a problem with how Internet Explorer handles cookies management. It is possible to go into IE and tell it that you don't want cookies, or to prompt you if one is getting created. Well, I did this, and the cookie stuff I was doing didn't work. I finally narrowed it down to the fact that I was testing on my local machine, over localhost. Even though I had told IE to override the default cookie management, it allowed cookies for localhost URLs (my local machine). When I uploaded the code to my public site (this blog) IE behaved as it should. I guess this is because IE sees localhost as a trusted domain, but I specifically told it how to handle cookies, and to override the defaults!

I just can't wait until Microsoft's competition forces them to make their web browser more usable...I know a lot of people like IE, but personally I prefer Firefox. However, as a web developer I have to test my pages in IE, since 80-85% of the web still uses it. Sigh...