Category: Internet Explorer

If you are trying to delete session cookies, those cookies with an expires or max-age value of -1 or no value set for that property, in Internet Explorer, you will probably notice that deleting them from the controls in the browser, does not actually delete them.

Evidently, the IE cookie implementation only writes persistent cookies to the file system and maintains the session cookies in RAM.  Moreover, when telling the browser to delete the cookies, it only deletes the cookies from the file system and does not delete them from RAM.

To delete session cookies in IE, you will need to restart the browser.

I am doing some client-side testing of IE 9 on Windows 7 and need to be able to view cookies and their associated data.

The F12 developer tools is insufficient for this task as using the Cache/View cookie information selection only shows the cookies for the current domain that you are browsing in the current tab.

Moreover, when going to Internet Options, General Tab, clicking on the Settings button under ‘Browsing History’, and then clicking on the ‘View files’ or ‘View objects’ button does not show the cookie files.

I ended up installing CookieSpy and with it am able to easily view and manage the cookies for all of the (supported) browsers on the machine.