Many times we come across cookies on our systems and especially our web browsers. I am pretty sure that most of us don’t really know mu...
Many times we come across cookies on our systems
and especially our web browsers. I am pretty sure that most of us don’t really
know much about it, what it’s all about or how and why we see it but we just
adapt to it. In this note, I will be treating the issue of web browser and I
believe after this note, you will have better understand of it which will help
you know when you need it, and if you don’t how to turn it off or put it on at
will. It’s really cool so let’s get started with it.
What is
Web Browser Cookie? The Web Browser Cookie also known as HTTP cookie,
web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie or simply cookie
as the case may be is known as a small piece of data sent from a website and
stored in the user's web browser while the user is browsing that site. This
means every time the user loads the website, the browser sends the cookie back
to the server to notify the user's previous activity
Generally, Cookies were designed to be a reliable
mechanism which websites uses to remember vital information given by the user
(this may be items added to a shopping cart in an online store) or to record
the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, Login in Details, or to
record the last pages visited). It can also store passwords and form content a
user has previously entered, such as a credit card number or an address.
Why Are
Cookies Important? : Cookies are important
to everybody who uses the internet because of the following reasons..
In other to make a website easier to use and
navigate from page to page while offering options to save some information,
cookies is been used.
Most secure websites use cookies to validate user’s
identity when they are been asked to login, also image that each time you want
to add an item to your cart in a shopping site and the previous item added is
gone and you keep doing this with no result, this will surely get you frustrated
but with the help of cookies, you are able to add items and make your purchase
at will.
With Cookies a site can improve: • Customer log-in
• Persistent shopping carts
• Wish lists
• Product recommendations
• Custom user interfaces (i.e. "Welcome back, John")
• Retaining customer address and payment information
Are
cookies harmful or harmless?: Although there There are lots of misguided
threads about cookies. Some visualize them as viruses or something malicious
that is going to do harm to your computer. Others say it takes a lot of disk
space. Well to some extent, none of these are true. They are just tiny
files (usually few bytes) which hardly take up disk space. And they are
certainly different from spyware which are placed in a similar manner in
your computer without your permission or knowledge in other to steal your
vital personal information (such as password, bank account number, credit card
number, social security number, etc.) So, spyware are bad and has larger
files, but cookies are generally innocuous and tiny files.
Important note, if you’ve never cleared cookies
from your computer and lots of them are installed in it over a long period of
time, they may take up some disk space. But you can download and install cookie
washer software which you can use to remove cookies. Some of this software
includes: Ad-Aware, adware, spyware etc from Download.com.
How to Delete Cookies Manually. To learn how to manually delete cookies of
different browsers from your system click here
