A cookie manager that asks for as little access as possible

I designed, built, tested and published Bokal on my own: a Manifest V3 extension for viewing, editing and exporting browser cookies, with paid plans, live on the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons.

Role: Solo: product, engineering, payments, testing, store release
Releases: 1.0 July 2026 · 1.1 September · 1.2 October
Published on: Chrome Web Store, Microsoft Edge Add-ons
Built with: TypeScript, React, WXT, Stripe

Chrome Web Store listing Edge Add-ons listing Source code on GitHub bokal.dev

Bokal's side panel listing a site's cookies, with export, import and search controls — The side panel on a signed-in site: every cookie, including HttpOnly ones, with search, export and per-cookie pin, protect and delete.

The problem

EditThisCookie, a cookie editor used by millions of people, was removed from the Chrome Web Store in December 2024. A copycat then took its name and was caught stealing logins. A cookie editor can read your session cookies, which is the same as being able to sign in as you, so the tool you replace it with should ask for as little access as possible and let anyone check what it does.

That set the brief: full cookie editing for developers and QA testers, the narrowest permissions Chrome allows, no tracking, and open source code.

Narrow permissions

The extension requests no access to any website at install time and no tabs permission. When you open it on a site, it asks for that one site. The whole permission block is short enough to read in one glance:

// manifest.json (published build)
"permissions": [
  "cookies", "storage", "sidePanel",
  "unlimitedStorage", "alarms", "activeTab"
],
"optional_host_permissions": ["<all_urls>"],
// no "host_permissions", no "tabs"
"content_security_policy": {
  "extension_pages":
    "script-src 'self'; object-src 'self'"
}

What Chrome's install prompt lists

No permission warnings. None of the permissions in this manifest triggers one.

What the usual shortcuts would add

Read your browsing history (the tabs permission)
Read and change all your data on all websites (site access at install)

Site access is requested later, one site at a time, when the user opens Bokal on that site. Using activeTab in place of tabs means the user clicks the toolbar button before Bokal can see which site is open.

Cookies other tools miss

HttpOnly cookies, usually the session cookie, are hidden from page scripts. Bokal reads and writes them through Chrome's cookies API.
Partitioned (CHIPS) cookies, Chrome's newer per-site cookie jars, get their own inspector. Saved profiles capture them too, so a login stored in one restores completely.
Audit hints flag missing SameSite, unpartitioned cross-site cookies and oversized values in the list.

Built for test automation

Developers can sign in by hand once and move the session straight into a test suite, without scripting the login. Bokal imports and exports:

JSON
Netscape cookies.txt
Cookie header
Playwright storageState
Playwright addCookies
Puppeteer setCookie

It also reads exports from Cookie-Editor and EditThisCookie, so switching over takes one file.

Payments without tracking

Bokal's paid tier saves cookie profiles: named sets of a site's cookies you can switch between, such as separate test accounts. Payments run through Stripe using ExtensionPay, with one-time, yearly and monthly plans and a restore-purchase path for a new computer.

Free users make no network calls. The payment service is contacted only after someone clicks Unlock Pro or Restore purchase. An end-to-end test asserts this in a real browser.
The profiles code loads on demand. Encryption and storage code sits in a separate chunk, and a CI check fails the build if it ever leaks into the main bundle.
Profiles stay on the device, optionally encrypted with AES-GCM and a key derived with PBKDF2 (600,000 iterations).
From version 1.2, one profile is free and the price is shown before any click.

Free tier at its limit: one saved, encrypted profile, the reason the next save is locked, and the price.

Testing

Every change runs through GitHub Actions: type-checking, unit tests, a production build, the bundle check, and end-to-end tests against two builds of the extension.

Layer	Count	What it proves
Unit tests (Vitest)	178	Parsers for every import format, permission logic, encryption, the free-tier limit, billing state
End-to-end tests (Playwright)	7	The real extension in Chromium on a real local site: create, edit, protect and delete cookies; a full purchase flow against a mocked payment server; a wrong passphrase deleting nothing
Privacy assertions	in the 7	A free user makes no request to the payment service and writes no synced storage; the profiles code isn't loaded until it's needed

The tests added in 1.2 were mutation-tested: deliberately breaking the on-demand loading makes them fail.

Getting through store review

Listings on the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, with in-app purchases disclosed
A hosted privacy policy, data-use disclosures that match the code, and a written justification for each permission
Checked against the Chrome Web Store policy update enforced from August 2026
A landing site with guides, search-engine metadata and social preview images

What I can build for you

New Manifest V3 extensions for Chrome and Edge, from spec to store listing
Payments and licensing through Stripe
Store submissions: listing, privacy policy, disclosures, permission review
End-to-end tests that load your extension in a real browser

The fastest way to reach me is the platform where you found this page.