What is One Smart Cookie?

One Smart Cookie is an advanced browser cookie manager for Internet Explorer. It lets you manage your Internet Explorer browser cookies in a way that is far more effective and powerful than the way Internet Explorer manages them.

What are browser cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data used by web sites to maintain user information. They allow a web site to store a bit of information on a user's computer and later retrieve that information in order to differentiate between different users as well as different sessions.

Most cookies are harmless and beneficial, and are used by web sites that offer personalization, sign-in, shopping carts, and other important features.

There are, however, many cookies that are not completely harmless. They are used by web advertisers to track individual web surfers and their web surfing habits. Some of these can be used by web sites for tracking your interests and then selling that information to marketers, resulting in a loss of privacy, unsolicited e-mail, and junk mail. Cookies can be used to track you even years after they've been put on your computer. There are even cookies that can track you across multiple sites and allow advertisers to see the search terms that you use in search engines. Just imagine if you are looking up information about a medical condition that you have. Would you want some third-party marketing company to have this information about you?

In addition to the privacy and security issues, cookies can also slow down your browser. Each cookie that you accumulate slows down your browser just a little bit. If you have thousands of cookies, or an older computer, you may start to notice sluggishness.

Some cookies can also get you into big trouble. The cookies folder on your computer is easily accessible to anyone who has local or remote access to your PC. Do you really want your spouse, your employer, or others to know about every web site you visited? Even if you don't visit pornographic sites, sometimes cookies from such sites can enter your computer because of pop-up ads or even unsolicited e-mails containing HTML code. Do you really want to risk losing your job or getting into a big fight with your spouse because of this?

What's wrong with managing my cookies in Internet Explorer?

Internet Explorer gives you very few options for managing your cookies:

• You can keep all your cookies and leave yourself open to the problems described above.
  
  

• You can periodically delete all your cookies by pressing the "Delete Cookies" button in Internet Options. But this will delete all your cookies, even important ones that allow easier sign-on to many of your favorite web sites. When you delete this type of cookie, a web site will no longer remember you, and you may be forced to contact a web site's administrator or customer support department.
  
  
• If you have some expertise you can dig around your system folders and manually delete cookies individually. This can take a long time as you go through hundreds of cookies one by one trying to remember which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to delete, which ones are new and which ones are old. Even after you do this, new cookies just keep coming in, so you have to repeat this tedious procedure all over again every few days. If you have a lot of spare time and enjoy boring chores such as this, then this option may be for you.
  
  
• You can enable Internet Explorer's advanced cookie privacy settings. But this may prevent you from using certain web sites properly, and can cause repeated and annoying pop-up messages as you surf the web. By using One Smart Cookie, you can still take advantage of some of these settings to further enhance your privacy but without any of the annoying pop-up messages.

The bottom line is that none of Internet Explorer's cookie management options are very good for most people. One Smart Cookie gives you a much better option.

What One Smart Cookie Does

One Smart Cookie remembers which cookies you wish to keep and prevents them from being deleted. As new cookies arrive, they are marked for deletion. When you review your cookies, you only have to concern yourself with those marked for deletion. If you want to keep them, you can unmark some or all of them, and then tell One Smart Cookie to delete the rest.

One Smart Cookie also has a feature called SmartExclude which can automatically protect common cookies that are required by many web sites for logging in. Examples include New York Times, Yahoo!, and many others. SmartExclude saves you time by not marking those cookies for deletion when they arrive so that you don't have to. Depending on your preferences, you may or may not want to use SmartExclude.

One Smart Cookie also has a Clear History and Cache feature that allows you instantly clear your browser history, your typed URLs, and browser cache files. This helps eliminate many traces of your web surfing activity from your PC.

System Requirements

• Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
• 100 MHz processor or better
• 640x480 or higher screen resolution
• 32MB of RAM or more
• 400K available hard disk space