Gmail persists despite clear cookies when all windows are closed

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#1

I don’t think this is a problem, it’s just something that makes me curious. I turned on “Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows” and it seems like a great idea. At first it was a pain having no cached authentication to anything, but I use a password vault so all I really need is to enter one password on each new session.

However, one service that seems to evade this feature is Gmail. Gmail not only knows who I am, but it keeps me authenticated across sessions. How is this happening?

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#3

Which all data do you clear on exit>>
I don’t see any settings other than a switch to turn on “Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows”. And regardless, that’s the only setting I’ve changed.

Have you given Gmail any specific permissions>>
No. Everything is out of the box. I haven’t done anything special other than add my Gmail url as a tab on startup.

Does Brave continue running background apps when closed>>
I checked and that setting was indeed turned on. I turned it off, closed everything and reopened - same behavior. So I restarted the machine and tried again, still same behavior.

do you have a Gmail extension installed>>
No, no Gmail extension installed.

Or a password extension that has permission to automatically sign into Gmail?>>
I have the LastPass extension installed, however when the browser starts (now that the clear all cookies on exit is set) I have to authenticate to it before it can do anything. The start up tab has already loaded and logged in before I even touch LastPass. But regardless of all that, even if I was authenticated to LastPass, none of my accounts have the auto-login set.

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#5

Oddly, none of the checkboxes are checked on the On Exit tab. This seems odd since every site that I’ve encountered (aside from Gmail), loses it’s knowledge of me whenever I close the browser (including my password manager). Per these settings, it would seem like nothing would get cleared.

#6

So I guess I can start checking some boxes, but it would only be for Gmail since no other sites seem to need them?

#8

I checked both passwords and cookies and one of them did the trick with Gmail.

But I think what happened is, the only thing that was actually getting cleared was my authentication to the LastPass extension. Every site (but apparently Gmail), I specifically do not choose to have the browser remember any login info. But maybe with Gmail I either did or it does anyway - bottomline is I don’t think anything was getting deleted before other than LastPass.

#9

Thanks for the pointers!

#11

@mbostleman,
If you try this again (where clear everything is enabled) and then restart the browser but do not visit gmail again, what do you see when you go to brave://settings/cookies/detail?site=mail.google.com&search=content+settings?

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