LiveID and third party cookies?
- Many users have third party cookies disabled, and when these users try to sign out of LiveID using Firefox, they'll be shown this:
Sign out failed!
We could not sign you out because your browser seems to be blocking third party cookies.
- Close all browser windows to sign out.
- To prevent this error in the future, you must enable third party cookies by chaging [sic] your browser settings.
Can anyone explain how LiveID uses third party cookies? I don't see this problem in IE8, even with 3rd party cookies disabled. Actually, I have IE8 set to prompt me about third party cookies, and when signing in/out of LiveID I don't even see one being set.
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When a user signs out, each service (Xbox LIVE, Zune, Hotmail, etc.) where user has signed into needs to clear the cookies it had set in its domain. Sign out page renders 1x1 gif images from these domains to clear the cookies. Since sign out page is rendered in login.live.com, these cookies act as 3rd party cookies and some browsers cannot clear them.
Sign out page checks the cookie handling behavior of the browser. If 3rd party cookies are blocked, then it redirects user to the error page which alerts that sign out may have failed.
Same is the behavior in IE8, when you set the browser setting to block 3rd party cookies.
- A piece of advise.
Don't listen to JGandhi. He works for Microsoft and it is his first post? I wouldn't think Microsoft would allow employees to just hand out advise unoffically over blogs.
Most importantly, regarding your Sign Out Failure message, Mirocsoft would not mispell CHANGE.
Have you recieved any mysterous failure messages in you email account? For emails you never sent. If so, were these messages sent at a time when you were exploring the "further reaches" of the web.
If this is true I would say you were in the wrong place with you hotmail account open and it was compromised. That is what happened to me recently. I have not changed any settings on my browser and contacted Microsoft directly.
By the way I know nothing about computers or the internet. I'm just a cop. I can't tell you where, just like a real microsoft employee could never say where he worked when giving advise.
Good Luck. - JGandhi is right in his explanation about how the sign out page works. When one of the sites fails (server down, server error, programming error) the page errors out with that message... there's not much you (as an end user) can do about it. As a developer, you can check your sign out-action by going to <URL to login handler>?action=clearcookie. It should give a 1x1 pixel gif. If it doesn't (check the source as well) something has gone wrong and you have to fix it.
