Pros & cons of accepting web cookies.

Pros and cons of web cookies

Hi folks! In this article, I will be talking about the Pros and Cons of Web Cookies. We all have heard about web cookies which are the small text file stored on your computer. Cookies are particularly used by websites to keep the track of visitors and users’ information and data such as their names, how much time they spent on-site page, how many links they opened, etc. If a web application is using cookies then the server will send a cookie and your browser i.e. Chrome, Firefox, Safari will store it. After this browser returns the cookies to the server for the next time the page is requested.

Furthermore, cookies are helpful in storing your data and information such as your preferences, password remember option, etc. If you read my previous article then you can get the proper idea about ‘Web Cookies‘. However, we can’t totally rely on the cookie for storing our information as there are many privacy issues with it. For that reason, I am going to highlight some of the Pros and Cons of cookies below.

The Pros of Web Cookies

  • Cookies are easy to implement as they support on the client’s side.
  • They hold a specific domain. Every domain has its own cookies. No domain will share its cookies with other domain and this is what makes them autonomous.
  • Users or clients can easily enable or disable the cookies if they find them on any site.
  •  Cookies are simple to use this can be the reason why they are enabled and disable from the client‘s side.
  • Cookies occupy less storage or memory. They don’t demand any server resource and are stored on the user’s computer so there is no extra burden on the server.
  • Cookies work transparently irrespective of the user being aware of the information which is being stored.
  • Cookies can be used for a lot more time than any other session rate as they persist a much longer period of time.
  • Cookies are configured to end as soon as the user’s session expires.

The Cons of Web Cookies

  • Cookies are not fully secured as can interfere with any external party. They may also pose a possible security risk because anyone can open and tamper with cookies.
  • Cookies can be disabled that means the client can decide not to use cookies on his browser.
  • Cookies will stop working if the security level is set too high in the browser as cookies will be disabled and the browser will delete the cookies.
  • Cookies will not accept or store complex data as it only allows plain or simple text.
  • There are chances of hacking cookies. As cookies are found on the user’s side that means they can be easily hacked into and modified.
  • The browser or domain only uses a limited number of cookies size. This makes it really limiting.
  • You will find difficulty in coding or decoding cookies. It demands extra coding which might affect application performance.

Final words

Web cookies are the most convenient way to carry information or store your data. When you accept or enable cookies while visiting a site, it provides you a great site experience. You get to know a lot about the site page and whenever you return back to any particular site you get the same data back which you left on the site page. When you store data on the server without using cookies this would create a lot of problems for you. So, you must know the Pros and Cons of cookies before you enable or accept them on any site page.

For another article kindly get in touch with us till then keep reading and keep sharing.