Safari 5.1, which is available for both Snow Leopard and Lion, changes the amount of cookie detail we can see in its Preferences. Here’s how to see all the details that were formerly available in Safari 5.0.5.

In Safari 5.0.5, if you looked at your (HTTP) cookies with: Safari Preferences -> Security -> Show Cookies, you’d see something like this:

Cookie Detail in Safari 5.0.5

However, Apple has, to put it politely, dumbed-down the display of cookies in Safari 5.1. If you select: Safari Preferences -> Privacy -> (Cookies and other website data:) -> Details, you’ll see a newly modified display.

Cookie (abbreviated) detail in Safari 5.1

To recover the ability to see the original cookie detail, do the following:

Go to Safari Preferences -> Advanced. At the bottom, check “Show Developer Menu in Menubar.” If necessary, visit the site for which you want to view the cookies. In Safari’s Developer menu, select “Show Web Inspector.” Select the “Resources” tab at the top and expand the “Cookies” disclosure triangle. Then select the site of interest to see the cookie details.

Developer Web Inspector

Here’s what the result looks like on my Mac for Apple’s website.

Recovered Cookie detail

If you select a row and click the “X” at the bottom of the main pane, you can selectively delete individual cookies. This is the same data that was shown in Safari 5.0.5, but the columns have been reordered sligtly.

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Thanks and props to TMO’s Webmaster, Adam Christianson, for discovering this technique.