Many websites ask for logins. Many website will enable you to save your details in a cookie, to save you logging in every time you go there. For those that don’t, you might choose to let your web browser remember the details for you. For some reason, eBay seems hell bent on letting me do any of those.
I never used to save my details on eBay, because it would stop me from accidentally bidding on something I didn’t want, or making a rediculous bid. It also made me think twice about things. I’d often enter a bid amount, then be asked to log in, and whilst doing this I’d ponder the bid a bit more and realise I actually didn’t want it.
Lately I’ve been selling a few things on eBay, so I’ve been in and out of My eBay to check my auctions. I decided to finally save the details, but it would seem eBay is fighting back. It will randomly remember it, and other times completely forget and I have to log in. I thought for a while it was because I would log in both at home and at work, the eBay login system would see different IPs and balk, killing the cookie. Fair enough I thought, but it doesn’t seem that this is the case any more.
My guess is that this is one of those ‘works fine in Internet Explorer’ things that I see so much these days. If it isn’t then I humbly retract this, but I honestly think it probably is. It’s about time web developers tested such trivial things more, and ensured these things do work well cross-platform.