Read-only sites ought work without cookies. Perhaps part of the issue is that disabling cookies via APIs makes the {session,local}Storage objects throw exceptions instead of only storing the issues for the duration of the current browsing context, which breaks a lot of javascript that doesn't handle these exceptions and a lot of badly written sites depend on javascript to even render something.

> most of the web wouldn't function at all without cookies.

To be fair, though, that's pretty clearly a bug; at a minimum, any site that's just serving content should be fine with no cookies. Of course, any site that's just content should also be at least 95% functional with no JS and barely any CSS, and we all know how that worked out...

> To be fair, though, that's pretty clearly a bug

No doubt. I was just making a statement about the current state of the web. Not applauding it in the least. :)

Why not? Assuming NYT has free pages and I want to access one of them, what do they need a cookie for?