Why It’s Important To Clear Out Cookies/Cache/History

There was a time when it’s wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to clear out everything from your web browser. It usually involved jumping through a lot of hoops and took at least a good 5 to 10 minutes (or longer) to do it.

These days it’s simple to clear everything out of the browser. In both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 or 8, all you have to do is use the keystroke CTRL+SHIFT+DEL. In addition, the way to start a "Private Browsing" session is also the same keystroke for FF and IE, that being CTRL+SHIFT+P (for IE I believe that’s IE8 only and not 7).

It should also be noted that CCleaner will also clear out cookies/cache from all browsers installed on your PC, so if you wanted a one-step clean-all solution, CCleaner is it.

Why is it important to clear out your browser session information? Here are a few good reasons.

Google cookies never expire

Only Google uses non-expiring cookies. This is bad and has been a longstanding complaint against the company by many over the years. For certain Google services (like Gmail), the login session will expire, but for regular Google searches, the cookie is forever there unless you manually delete it yourself via clean-up as described above.

The reason people complain about Google’s non-expiring cookies is because it’s unethical. Google completely throws that out the window and does it anyway, and that’s why it makes many people so upset.

All other search engines do not have forever-there cookie retention policies. Only Google does.

Anybody else that uses your PC can easily find out where you’ve been

Example situation: You’re a husband that goes online and shops for a present for your wife’s birthday. You find something and purchase it. Later on your wife uses the same computer. She can easily go into the browser history and see what sites you’ve been to, see that you visited certain places and the surprise gift you bought for your wife is no longer a surprise.

When people talk about clearing your browser session information, they’re usually referring to protecting yourself from hackers, phishers and so on. I’m talking about getting much more local than that and make it so people in your own house cannot snoop on you via the browser history – which most people would consider more important.

The browser cannot be trusted to hold username/password information

I tell people time and time again to never trust the browser with your username and password information for any site that you visit – ever. The reason? If the browser is compromised, all your credential information goes along with it. It is just a bad, bad idea to hold that type of information in a browser.

When you use the browser to hold this type of information, you’re essentially forced to not clear out your cookies/cache – and that’s bad. You should be able to clear this information at any time without affecting anything else.

A program outside the browser for username/password information is always the best way to go about it, such as KeePass.

If you’re intent on staying in the browser without using an external program for username/password information, you can alternatively use RoboForm. This is widely used and widely trusted. RoboForm has a free and paid version, but it should be noted that the paid version actually gives you a toll-free number to call should you have any issues with the software – and that’s great.

Old cookies/cache can screw up web sites you routinely use

Periodically there are web sites you use that will perform routine updates. Some of these updates obviously don’t go very well, and what happens is that when you have old information trying to access an updated system, weird things happen. These weird things I speak of is that you enter your username/password, the the session resets over and over again. Or the graphics are all skewed and "blocky" looking. Or the browser will simply close itself for no reason at all. All of this can occur with a bad login session and/or old cache data that needs to be cleared out.

Tip: If you run into this problem, a quick fix can sometimes be as easy as CTRL+F5 (force-reloads a web site’s content as all-new), but this only works some of the time because it doesn’t affect the cookie.

How often should you clear out your browser session information?

At least once a week. Remember that you can be selective with what you delete. On both FF and IE, you can opt to only delete certain information. It’s probably true that you only want to delete the cookies, cache and not the browser history. This is easy with the CTRL+SHIFT+DEL function mentioned above.

In Firefox:

In Internet Explorer 8:

You can simply uncheck what you want/don’t want deleted.