What does cookie mean

A cookie is a small piece of text that is stored on a user's computer through their browser. Common uses for cookies are authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart items, and server session identification.

#The operating environment of this article: Windows 7 system, Dell G3 computer.

A cookie is a small piece of text that is stored on a user's computer through their browser. Common uses for cookies are authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart items, and server session identification. Every time the user's web browser interacts with a web server, it passes cookie information to the web server. Only cookies stored by your browser related to the domain in the request URL are sent to the server.

Essentially, cookies are a great way to link one page to the next for users to interact with a web site or web application.

What does Cookie mean?

A cookie is a text file stored on the user's machine by the web browser. Cookies are a way for web applications to maintain application state. They are used by websites for authentication, storing website information/preferences, other browsing information, and anything else that helps the web browser when accessing the web server. HTTP cookies are known by many different names, including browser cookies, web cookies, or HTTP cookies.

Cookies contain certain information that is encrypted for security purposes. Typically, cookies are connected to web browsers along with HTTP headers from HTTP servers in response to user requests. Whenever a specific website needs to be accessed, the stored cookie is sent to the HTTP server.

Cookies have two management modes: those with expiration dates and those without expiration dates. Cookies without an expiry date are automatically stored on the user's machine and remain in system memory until the user's browsing is terminated. Expired cookies will expire beyond this date.

Most people may not understand what cookies are. Many people think that cookies are small files that contain viruses, malware, or spyware. These are all misunderstandings. In 1994, Lou Montulli, a founding engineer at Netscape, became the first person to apply the concept of "magic cookies." These are just simple text files stored on the user's computer.

The web server will allow the browser to save this text file and resend it with every request from the user. This file helps the server identify each user.

The following are the types/variations of cookies:

Session cookies: Created for a specific session, these cookies expire when the user's browser session is terminated.

Persistent cookies: Often called tracking cookies, these cookies have a specific period of time before they expire.

Secure cookies: Security cookies are used to provide maximum security to user data through encryption when users access the server via HTTPS.

Zombie cookie: These cookies are automatically recreated after being deleted by the user.

This article is a detailed introduction to what cookies mean. I hope it will be helpful to friends in need!

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