Friday, October 14, 2005

How I set my Firefox/Mozilla cookies setting (deprecated)

Cookies are delicious delicacies.

I'm using Firefox and I would like to share with you my cookies setting which I think is efficient.

Firstly I check the box "Allow sites to set cookies" and uncheck "from the originating web site only", and choose to keep cookies "until I close Firefox".

This way, you need not handle cookies by yourself. Most web sites which have cookies do so to keep track of visitors. By flushing the cookies, you will ensure that the information they have on you is gone whenever you restart the browser.

There are some exceptions to this and it is your personal preference. You can of course add sites to "Block" but there is no need to under this setting as cookies will be flushed.

There are some web sites which you will want to manually add to "Allow" list. This includes websites which you log in to and want to leave logged in. An example is del.icio.us which you have to leave logged in to enable you to post websites. Other websites which you do not necessarily log in to but want to keep your preferences include google, as you may not be a gmail user but want to keep your search preferences. If you host a web page where you use trackers, you will of course want to add your tracker site to "Allow" too as you do not want to inflate your page views. So as I'm using sitemeter.com, I have it added to "Allow".

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The good thing about this cookie setting is that need not have to intervene in the handling of cookies. I don't need to block sites but just need to do the occasional allowing.(How many site do you really need to allow anyway?) Should I forget to allow, I just have to log in and overtime I will realize that I've not "Allow"ed the site. However, once it's done, I can sit back and relax and enjoy surfing the Internet. The downside to this? Companies that set their cookies to expire in year 2049 will not be able to track you down unless you leave your browser open all the time which should not be the case with Firefox as you will have to restart it after updating extensions or the browser itself. Other websites including your friend's homepage/blog will register your hits as unique hits. But who cares anyway? They don't care about your privacy so you are not obliged to provide them with accurate stats.

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