Safari and cookies

When you visit a website, it will often install what are called cookies onto your computer. You can read more about cookies on wikipedia, but just know that they hold information like login name to use for the site, etc.

While browsing, you can collect a lot of cookies. I’ve normally not bothered with managing cookies, but lately I’ve noticed Safari getting slower and slower as well as having issues navigating some forums.

Safari on a different computer worked fine, and Firefox on my computer worked fine. So, what was different? I thought, “Cookies!”

I then deleted all of my cookies. Yep, everyone of them. There were over 2500 cookies!

Now, Safari works fine on the aforementioned problematic sites. Safari also launches quicker.

What did I lose? Not much, really. I’ve had to re-enter account information on a few sites, and lost which forums I had read on others (an abuse of cookies, that should be stored on the server!), but I have not found anything I lost of importance. Cookies are, after all, supposed to be ephemeral and session based.

So, how do you see what cookies you have and manage them? In Safari, choose Preferences from the Safari menu. Then click the Security tab and choose “Show Cookies”:

You can then search for cookies by domain name, select subset of cookies and choose Remove, or just nuke them all by choosing Remove All.

I suggest if you do remove some of your cookies to then Quit and Open Safari, just to make sure the removed cookies are indeed gone.

Happy cookie baking!