What are computer cookies?

Question

What exactly are they, and what is their purpose? Do you need them, and if not how do you find them/get rid of them?

Answer 1

Cookies make it easier to load the page when you go there and are usually quite harmless. However on some sites you can get tracking cookies which monitors the people that go to that site.

Answer 2

Cookies are small files that are placed on your computer when you visit a website, assuming you have your cookies enabled in your web browser's settings.

They are used to make a users experience on a website more efficient by tracking their site usage. For instance, you've probably been to a site that had a pop-up the first time you were there, but not the second time. That's because a cookie on your computer told the site you had already seen the pop-up. That is just one example of how a cookie is used by a website, but there are many more, from assisting with forms to displaying specific content based on how you use a site.

Cookies are also used by website owners to track how users interact with the site and can use that information to provide a better service and/or design the site to function differently.

You don't necessarily need to use cookies, although it may slightly slow down your web browsing if you choose to block them. You can delete your cookies by going to the "Internet Options" section within the tools menu or the "Delete Browsing History..." if you have the most recent version of Explorer.

Hope this helps and happy surfing.

Answer 3

Cookies are a way for web developers to remember specific information about your visit to a website. Sometimes, this is used so if you leave the website and come back tomorrow, it will remember who you are so you don't have to log back in. As a web developer, I know that cookies aren't the most reliable way to do things because users can disable cookies, which is why I don't use cookies if I can help it.

Disabling and/or deleting cookies depends on your browser. If you're using Mozilla Firefox, just hit CTRL-SHIFT-DEL and select what information you wish to remove. If you're using Internet Explorer, select Tools, Internet Options, and under Browsing History, click Delete.

Answer 4

Cookies

Cookies are actually harmless text files that certain web sites will place onto the hard drive of your computer. Your Internet Browser will then load the information into memory while you are visiting their site. The Cookie itself, actually takes up very little space and acts as an identification card for the visiting site. You can compare this to visiting your favorite restaurant where your food server will usually remember certain aspects of how you like your food prepared and what you usually order. This information would obviously be based upon his familiarity of your prior visits. Well Cookies actually act in a similar manner and do not contain viruses as a virus must be executable file. Let us look at some of the ways that Cookies act as an identification card.

Why Sites Use Cookies?

There are numerous reasons why websites would want to use cookies. These range from statistical purposes, such as how many visitors came to the site. This can be further broken down into are they new visitors or actually repeating visitors and how often do they visit. The Website would actually create a unique id for each visitor and store this information into a database.

Cookies can be used to store your personal preferences, referred to as customizations, that you set while navigating their site. For instance, if you visit Yahoo.com, you can sign in to create your very own personal yahoo page where you can customize it according to your news and weather preferences after providing your zip code. You can even change the color of the page layout as well.

Online Shopping sites can use cookies to keep track of items that you add to their shopping carts and quick checkout options. The cookie will keep track of every item that you add to the shopping cart while you continue to browse through different pages or even entirely different sections of their site. Every item you add is stored within the Web site’s database along with a unique ID value that has been assigned to you. Therefore, when you select the check out option, the site automatically knows what items are in your cart by retrieving those selections from its database. This is why sites such as Amazon or eBay will prompt you to enable cookies in case you have disabled them.

Cookies also provide web designers and programmers with a quick and convenient method of keeping their site content fresh and up to date according to the interests of their users. Modern web servers use Cookies for back-end interaction as well, allowing them to securely store any personal data that the user has entered within a site. Therefore, on return visits the user now only has to enter partial information to access their account and purchases can be made quicker as their payment information is on file regarding their previous purchases.

In closing, as Cookies are actually small text files, they really can not damage your computer system or any files on your hard drive. Once again, they cannot transmit viruses as viruses are executable in nature. Some users may just not want to be tracked and this is one of the primary reasons why many people just disable accepting cookies.


For The Latest Version of Internet Explorer

Click on the word Tools, which is contained in your top tool bar area.

This will pull down a menu for you to now click on Internet Options.

Then click on the Privacy tab located at the top of the options windows.

Then click on the Advanced tab to bring up the Advanced Privacy Settings windows.

This is the area where you can define how Cookies are handled on your system etc.