Add-ons using the techniques described in this document are considered a legacy technology in Firefox. Don't use these techniques to develop new add-ons. Use WebExtensions instead. If you maintain an add-on which uses the techniques described here, consider migrating it to use WebExtensions.
Starting from Firefox 53, no new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) for desktop Firefox and Firefox for Android.
Starting from Firefox 57, WebExtensions will be the only supported extension type. Desktop Firefox and Firefox for Android will not load other extension types.
Even before Firefox 57, changes coming up in the Firefox platform will break many legacy extensions. These changes include multiprocess Firefox (e10s), sandboxing, and multiple content processes. Legacy extensions that are affected by these changes should migrate to WebExtensions if they can. See the "Compatibility Milestones" document for more information.
A wiki page containing resources, migration paths, office hours, and more, is available to help developers transition to the new technologies.
Reading existing cookies
Cookies for a given host, represented as nsICookie2 objects, can be enumerated as such:
let enum = Services.cookies.getCookiesFromHost("example.com");
while (enum.hasMoreElements()) {
var cookie = enum.getNext().QueryInterface(Ci.nsICookie2);
dump(cookie.host + ";" + cookie.name + "=" + cookie.value + "\n");
}
All cookies, regardless of host, can be enumerated using Services.cookies.enumerator rather than getCookiesFromHost().
Setting a cookie
The following code demonstrates how to set a cookie in Firefox.
Services.cookies.add(".host.example.com", "/cookie-path", "cookie_name", "cookie_value", is_secure, is_http_only, is_session, expiry_date);