Why and how to delete cookies

Why and how to delete cookies

Internet cookies are the text data stored by the browser for different purposes. They make the Web easier to navigate by keeping the list of users’ preferences. Almost every major websites use them because they provide a better user experience and make it much easier to gather accurate information about the site's visitors.

A Web server put a text information or cookie as name-value pairs on the hard disk of user’s computer. This is done by generating a unique ID number for each visitor and storing the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file. Later this information is retrieved by the website. Using cookies, sites can determine that how many visitors arrive, how many are new versus repeat visitors, how often a visitor has visited, sites can store user preferences so that the site can look different for each visitor, sites can implement things like shopping carts and "quick checkout" options so when you check out, the site knows what is in your cart by retrieving all of your selections from the database.

So we see that there are many advantages of using cookies. But there are situations when you would like to delete cookies from your system. If you are using a machine shared by different people you would obviously not like the idea of many people having access to your private information stored in cookies. Besides, a site can sell all the information stored in cookies to some other sites and you may be deluded with junk mails. Cookies can also be used as spyware and malware. So to prevent all these things you need to delete cookies from your system time to time. You can do this either manually or can take the help of some tools available for this purpose.
If you have Internet Explorer running on your computer, you can delete cookies manually by following the steps given below:
Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools
2) Click on Internet Options
3) On the General Tab, in the middle of the screen, click on Delete Cookies and click OK to delete cookies.
For Firefox, you need to proceed as follows:
Open Firefox and click on Tools
2) Click on Options. A menu box will open.
3) Under the privacy tab, choose "Custom settings for History and then click on‘Show Cookies’ tab.
4) Click on ‘Remove Cookies’ or ‘Remove All Cookies’ tab.

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