What happens if cookies are disabled?

Question

Pretty basic question here. In PHP, if the user's browser has cookies disabled, you cannot make use of both server cookies ($_SESSION) AND client cookies ($_COOKIE, setcookie) or only the latter are disabled? Basically you can't make the user log in or do anything that requires a session, right?

Also, in which case would someone want to have cookies disabled?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, it's true. Both sessions and normal cookies are normal cookies. If a user does not accept cookies, he cannot use any of the functionality enabled by them. Which means pretty much the whole internet would break for that user, which is why in this day and age there's virtually nobody who has cookies disabled entirely.

PHP has a built-in mechanism called transparent session ids, which automagically rewrites all links to contain the session id in a query parameter. I would not suggest using it, since session ids in the URL open up a whole new can of worms.

For user friendliness, I'd recommend you test whether the user has cookies enabled or not (set a cookie, redirect to the next page with a flag in the URL that cookies should be set, see if you get any cookies back) and if not, kindly advise the user to enable them.