Greetings. Google has announced an early implementation of Web Sockets in their Chrome browser, that shows much promise for helping to reduce a significant bottleneck in a variety of browser-based applications.

However -- and I'm gonna keep hammering on this! -- I still unfortunately cannot recommend Google Chrome as a general purpose browser until it includes reasonable per-site cookie controls at least up to par with what Firefox (and to some extent IE) natively offer. If this can be accomplished via a Chrome plugin, that's OK -- but there's no plugin to do this yet in Chrome as far as I know (am I wrong?)

I'm not a hardcore cookie hater, and clearly there are many reasonable uses for cookies, particularly for state control. But the "all, nothing, or no '3rd party' cookies" choice palette is insufficient. Users who wish to block cookies from specific sites (e.g. when they don't wish to be tracked by those sites) are typically stuck in Chrome with the only option being to turn off all cookies in a manner that breaks logins at most sites that require authentication.

Admittedly, some people get themselves into trouble with per-site cookie controls, by blocking cookies necessary to logins (creating the infamous "repeating login dialogue" effect).

But this is still not a valid excuse for users being unable to control -- per site and in detail -- how cookies will be managed in their browsers.

When I made earlier queries about this issue to Google, I was told that better Chrome cookie controls were on the wish list, but would have to wait. However, with so many sophisticated features now being rolled out for Chrome seemingly almost daily, the lack of better cookie controls -- which by all rights should not be a comparatively major implementation task -- seems more glaring. I might add that the same issue persists in the standard Android Web browser as well.

I hope that Google will move on this matter with due diligence.

--Lauren--