77. About Cookies and Firefox

A cookie is an information file stored on your computer as a text file. Cookies can hold preference information for how you view and interact with a particular website. Cookies can also hold passwords and other personal information related to a particular website that you use.

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Cookies can't spread viruses or do bad things to your computer's hard drive. But some websites can use cookies to record your preferences and other information without you knowing it and then use it to show you certain advertisement content or bombard you with certain pop-ups. So, cookies can be annoying, but they certainly aren't a major threat to your system.

Tip

If you don't want to deal with nefarious cookies, you should stay off nefarious websites. The types of sites that you browse at home are one thing, but in a professional environment, stay away from sites of an unsavory nature (you'll have to decide what you consider unsavory).

In some cases a cookie is required to use a website. This is particularly true of sites that you subscribe to and that use a logon name and password to enter the site.

Firefox actually provides you with a lot of flexibility in dealing with cookies. You can create cookie rules and then accept or reject cookies on-the-fly as you browse the Web. By default Firefox is configured to accept all cookies. In some cases, blocking a cookie (or deleting a cookie from the cookie list) keeps a particular site from functioning correctly when you attempt to go to that site.