by Thomas Walters

Created on: August 06, 2009

Cookies are a way of extending the user experience so that small amounts of information can be stored on the user's machine and later retrieve for analysis or deletion by a webpage some point after their creation. They are useful in the way that they allow a more personalized user experience. For example, although primitive a page could ask the user for their name, and upon their next visit greet that same user with their name. Such a method of use is not widely used but demonstrates the practical examples of using cookies.

Cookies are very simple files. They are text-based data files and therefore use only a small amount of space. However over time the accumulation of a vast amount of cookies could lead to some hefty folders containing cookies. This amount of data is usually negligible unless you are using a computer will little hard-drive space. In cases whereby the user's computer only has a small amount of hard-drive space, such as 40GB, and a large amount of this space is used for personal files, cookies may be deleted without much notice to the user.

So what differences might a user experience upon the deletion of cookies? Differences such as the browser no longer remembering your login details for social networking and for that matter all sites; you may find that the 'When last visited' feature of a website no longer displays when you last visited, and other information regarding personal details and general information about the user. Other things such as a certain greeting page that the user has already seen may be displayed again and if someone has referred you to a site to which they are affiliated with they would no longer benefit if you were to buy a product.

Deleting cookies may also result in some user annoyance. As mentioned above general login information will be forgotten meaning that the user will have to spend time filling in these forms which they are used to simply bypassing using the cookies on their machine. Also many websites that use advertisements use cookies to monitor what ads you are and are not clicking on. For example if you see an ad three times, the fourth, you aren't going to click on it. Therefore a cookie is placed to ensure the user doesn't keep seeing the same, ineffective, ad over and over. Deleting such a cookie would cause the user to see the ad that they have already seen that doesn't interest them, thus possibly causing irritation.

Cookies - don't delete them unless you really need to!

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