On Mar 13, 2009, at 1:33 AM, Joshua Juran wrote:
I was browsing YouTube videos when I suddenly got:
400 Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.
Cookie: ...; watched_video_id_list_USER=[stuff in base64, but
really a whole freakin' lot of it, such that even with the window
stretched to fill my 24" screen, it goes all the way off the end]
Oh, so every video I watch (and rate, and every comment I vote on)
gets recorded in a cookie and the entire cumulative history is sent
back to the server on every request, expiring with the session.
Unfortunately, this time Firefox failed to crash in advance of
exhausting the allowed Cookie header length.
Well, now that I know the problem it's no big deal right? Just
delete the YouTube cookies, and login again. Except, I use the
"Sign in with your Google Account!" feature, which now does...
nothing.
YouTube is the adopted black sheep bastard child of Google apps. I
now hate it worse than PHP.
Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. I've run into this before and I
should have recognized it.
"Just delete the YouTube cookies," I said. But no, it's never that
simple, is it? Because in Firefox, deleting a site's cookies also
means to block that site's cookies from now on. It wasn't until I
also deleted cookies from google.com that the damage was enough that
I got an error message complaining that I had cookies disabled,
finally clueing me in.
How about, DON'T DO SHIT I HAVEN'T ASKED FOR.[1] Especially when
there's no indication that it's happened and it's going to cause
errors at a distance.
YouTube however remains on the hook for failing to scale to Firefox's
ever-diminishing level of instability.
Hatefully yours,
Josh
[1] Like auto-play? Here's hating at you, YouTube.
