Keeping an eye on the cookiejar

Konqueror is excellent for monitoring what cookies different websites store on the computer. Blocking various identification cookies is an excellent way of enforcing privacy and speeding up web surfing.

Since most cookies are transmitted back and forth between the server and the browser with every request for every resource…they tend to slow down everything. The requests can be speed up by blocking unnecessary cookies such as cookies from advertisement, session and user identification cookies, preference cookies that repeat the information available elsewhere in the request (HTTP content negotiation), and so on.

Konqueror enables quick reviewing of each cookie before they are stored in the cookiejar. Thus allowing users to expose what cookies really are necessary. The only web browser I know about with better cookie management is Internet Explorer 7 with high privacy settings.

I have been studying cookies set in my web browser for a three months. I am shocked by how poorly cookies are implemented on many popular websites. For example, about every website sets cookies globally instead of limiting them to a path. If they where limited to a path—like, the path to the single resource required to know the contents of that particular cookie—they would only be sent when requesting that particular path. Most websites instead find it most effective to send every cookie with every request. Thus slowing down every request with a couple of unnecessary extra bytes in the requests.

Until website developers start thinking of their cookies, I recommend experienced web users to start looking at their cookies.

Do you monitor what information is stored in your cookiejar?

PS: I apologise for the new analytics cookies set by Mint being pushed trough this site. They are not efficiently designed at all. I have contacted the developer of Mint about the matter. I will stop using Mint analytics if a new cookie-efficient release is not made available very soon.

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