Show cookies plugin

As a web developer, I find it sometimes necessary to work with cookies in a web browser. For example, sometimes I need to make sure I am setting and reading encrypted cookies correctly for a login system. Sometimes I just want to remember the last time someone visited. Either way, sometimes I need to manipulate those little tasty morsels manually.

As most folks know, the built-in cookie management in Internet Explorer (or Maxthon, actually, which uses the IE rendering engine) is horrid. It essentially opens up a regular Windows Explorer window with skazillions of *.txt files. You can’t really edit those *.txt files easily to remove specific cookies, so it’s all or nothing. If you want to get rid of one cookie, you must get rid of all the cookies set by that site by deleting the *.txt file.

This is no good.

So, based on a plugin I wrote to view cookies a long time ago, I have written a plugin to remove selected cookies from a web site. It works as a context menu item in the browser window. After installing, you can simply right-click in the browser window and select “Show Cookies” from the context menu.

When selected, a new window will open up showing you all of the cookies (permanent and session) that have been set by that site. From this window, you can select individual cookies and delete them if wanted.

(Remember, though, that if you delete a cookie from this popup window, the web site you are visiting won’t know you lost it until you refresh the parent page.)

This tool has been invaluable for me in development work. Perhaps it will help you too. Please let me know if you find it useful! You can download the installer here.

Comments (2) »

1. Lopo says:

   1/18/2006 at 12:39 pm

   Hi,

   Altough yours look very clean and nice I suppose you don’t work with Firefox.
   See this for some ideas to improve even more your already very nice tool:

   http://addneditcookies.mozdev.org/

   Best,

   Lopo

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2. Jeff says:

   11/21/2007 at 1:15 pm

   Thank You! Your nice tool saved me.

   I really had a hard time finding any good tools for looking at IE cookies. Had to do some web programming and testing with IE and really needed to check on cookie info, luckily found your site.

   Thanks again for your tool.

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