Talkings of a Tyrant

Cookies are little pieces of information that sites give to your browser for a variety of reasons. They are usually used to track you through the site (find out if a large enough number of people who like pancakes also like berries, etc.) or to keep you logged in. My habits tend to be that of: “I want to stay logged in to Gmail, but I want all the other cookies to go when I quit Firefox.”

If this is what you want, then CookieCuller is the extension for you!

CookieCuller allows you to “Protect” specific cookies. These cookies won’t be deleted unless you do it manually from Firefox’s built-in cookie manager, or unprotect it. Under the extension’s options, you can tell it to delete any unprotected cookies at Firefox’s start up. Strangely, that is the only option, but it still has its own menu. It would probably be simpler to put the option in the main CookieCuller dialogue rather than on its own. Maybe there is a real reason for it. I don’t know…

Keep in mind that Firefox’s built-in cookie manager takes priority over CookieCuller. This means that if you’ve set your cookies to expire at the end of Firefox’s session, then any cookies placed will expire at the end of the session, regardless of whether or not the cookies are protected.

Make sure your options look something like this:

CookieCuller is a great extension for control freaks like me and power users in general. It is easy to learn and easy to use, though sometimes figuring out what exactly a cookie does is confusing. However, that isn’t really the extension’s fault, as cookies are generally confusing. If you would like more information about your browser cookies, I would suggest “Are Cookies Dangerous?” by Dave Child.

Download CookieCuller
CookieCuller website
Get Firefox 1.5