Article by George Norman

On 22 Sep 2009

It’s been said before, but to my mind this bears repeating: cookies are small pieces of text (.txt files) that your web browser stores on your hard disk. It does this for a reason: so it can remember things like your browsing preferences, certain login data, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, and other data. For privacy reasons (visitors to certain web pages can be tracked via cookies), in order to clear up some hard disk space, or for any other reason, the user can manually or automatically delete cookies in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

Here I will show you a simple means of viewing the cookies that the Microsoft developed IE8 browser stored on your hard disk drive. It is also a handy way to verify that the cookies you deleted manually have actually been erased from your system.


Here is what you have to do to view cookies in IE 8 / verify cookies have been deleted in IE8:

Step 1. Launch Internet Explorer. Double click the icon on the desktop, click the Quick Launch icon, or whatever other means you use to launch the software application.

Step 2. A list of menus is displayed on the top left hand corner of the window. Click Tools.

Step 3. In the dropdown menu that appears click Internet Options.

Step 4. In the Internet Options window that appeared, in the Browsing history section, click Settings.

Step 5. The Temporary Internet Files and History Settings window will pop up. In the bottom right hand side click on View Files. The folder where all temporary internet files are stored will be opened. In it you can see all the cookies IE8 has stored. They are simple to locate as they are the only text documents in there and they all include the word cookie in their title (like for example cookie:XYZ@google). It will be even easier to spot them if you sort the files according to type.

Tips and warnings
Steps 1 through 3 in the tutorial presented above can be replaced by this: Start -> Run in XP or Start Search in Vista -> type in inetcpl.cpl -> press Enter.
Please note that cookies are not viruses, nor are they spyware. Some security software applications do indeed detect cookies, but this is only because some cookies can be used to track the user who visits a certain web page.
Before you delete the IE8 cookies stored on your computer, it might prove wise to do a backup. See how to export IE8 cookies here.
If you are a Firefox user, we’ve got you covered. Here’s how to manually delete cookies in Firefox and how to automatically delete cookies in Firefox.



Tags: Microsoft, Internet Explorer, IE, Cookies, View

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