Two letter domain? No cookies for you!
Michael Geary | Wed, 2007-09-05 08:14
category
This is too strange to believe, but it is true.
I’ve noticed that it is impossible to log in as a registered user here at mg.to using Internet Explorer, even though other browsers work fine.
Now I know why:
Internet Explorer does not set a cookie for two-letter domains (Microsoft Knowledge Base)
IE and 2-letter domain-names (crisp’s blog)
As the owner (since 1997) of mu.nu, I’m all too familiar with this “feature”. Technically, it’s correct, but that’s not a lot of comfort for the users who can’t log in. I was hoping they would fix it with IE7, but no.
I had no idea IE had this policy, though I know what problem they are trying to solve with it. Have a look here: Yngve Pettersen (Opera developer) explains cookie TLD problems
Opera solves the same problem by disallowing cookies for a name that has no associated DNS entry. That should make mg.to work just fine :-) but I know it causes some other sites to fail.
Internet Explorer has so many different things wrong with it. I was surprised to find this when I was searching about two letter domain names.