Cookie Pal

Cookies can be extremely valuable as they allow you (as a visitor to a site) to personalize your browsing experiences. On the other hand, unethical marketing and advertising companies often use cookies to aid in tracking your surfing habits all over the internet. Thus, there are occasions where you would like cookies to be used, and there are other times when you need to block them entirely.

Unfortunately, the cookie management capabilities of all of the major browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape) are, how shall I say this, lacking. Actually, to be more precise, the methods they incorporate (and this includes the most recent versions as well) are just plain idiotic and completely unusable. Only morons would have designed cookie management the way it is implemented within browsers today.

Fortunately, many companies have stepped up to the plate to fill the void left by short-sighted browser designers. There now exist several different professional and shareware programs which allow you, the surfer, to control which cookies you want to allow and which you want to disallow. 

I have personally tried a large number of these programs and finally, after many disappoints, have found the perfect cookie management program! This is called "Cookie Pal" and it is indeed a dream come true.

This program receives my highest recommendation, as it performs it's task very well. Finally you have complete and total control over cookies. Whatever you need to do with them is handled by this program, which sits in your system tray and intercepts all attempts to access a cookie on your computer.

When such an attempt is made, Cookie Pal checks it's filters (see the screen above) to determine if you've received a cookie from this source before and defined what to do with them. For example, you may want to receive cookies from About.Com. The first time you visit About, Cookie Pal will pop up and tell you that a cookie is being received. You have the option to accept or deny the cookie, and to indicate if you always want to accept or deny them for that source (which can be a specific site or any site on the domain).

Cookie Pal supports virtually any browser that accepts cookies. The list of "officially supported" browsers includes:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x, 4.x and 5.x
• Netscape Navigator 3.x and 4.x
• Opera 4.x and 5.x
• Neoplanet
• America Online 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 for Windows 95/98/ME
• CompuServe WinCIM 3.0.1 and 4.0 and 2000
• Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.
• Eudora E-mail
• Windows Media Player and RealPlayer

Cookie Pal also allows you to completely manage your cookie directory for any browser on your system. As the screen show above demonstrates, Cookie Pal can display a list of every cookie on your system. You can then delete those cookies if necessary (or all of them if you want).

Additional Information

• Cookies Cookies (under names like magic cookies, persistent cookies, and just plain cookies) are basically harmless, but many surfers are very much afraid of them for various reasons. Companies like Doubleclick use them to track your surfing habits. These can be a great way to personalize your experience on a web site, though, and sometimes a web site simply will not work. 

• HTML tag reference guide - <META http-equiv set-cookie>

• So What's A Cookie For, Anyway? Cookies were invented for a good reason and have valid uses. It's too bad evil companies have perverted the concept and threatened our privacy.

• The Fear Of Cookies Afraid of the lowly cookie file. Here's some of the reasons why you should be.