30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover

There are two kinds of cookies. “Normal” cookies are those which are sent back to the server. For example, if you fill in the “Comments” section of this website and check the box to “Remember My Information” the site will request to store a cookie in your browser. Many, many sites do this and they are safe 99.9% of the time. Any time you go to a site and they automatically log you in or remember your username, they have most likely set a cookie.

Third-party cookies are those which are set by another server. These are generally, but not always, advertising sites. Now I don’t have anything against advertising per se (ahem), but if those ads are delivered with cookies, companies can track your shopping habits and possibly (just possibly) connect your surfing habits with your personal information.

You can choose different options for Normal and Third Party cookies. Your options are:

Accept all cookies

Anyone who wants to set a cookie can, for however long they want.

Let me decide every time I receive one

Opera will prompt you to accept or reject cookies every time a site tries to set one.

Treat as specified in Server Manager

Once you make a decision about cookies for a site, tell Opera to remember that selection

Refuse all cookies

Don’t allow any site to set cookies

Accept only cookies sent to the server itself {only exists in “Third Party Cookies” options}

Do not accept any third party cookies.

Now those are the theoretical categories. I’ve often tried to be vigilant about my cookies, but it never lasts long. Setting “Refuse all cookies” will cause some sites to fail. Setting “Let me decide every time I receive one” quickly gets annoying, as some sites are very persistent about trying to set cookies.

A practical compromise is to set “Normal” cookies to “Accept all” and set “Third Party” to “Let me decide every time I receive one”.

Select a cookie to examine, edit, or delete it.

You can view or change information here, such as the expiration date.

There are some enhancements that I would like to see Opera offer. They offer an option to “Delete new cookies when exiting Opera” but I would like to see another option to delete only new third party cookies when exiting Opera. I would also like to be able to decide the maximum life of a cookie. Some sites want to set them to expire in 30+ years! Personally I don’t see any reason to have them that long. I’d like to be able to say “Accept all cookies, but limit their life to X number of days or a year” (similar to what we do for History settings above).

I usually enable “Accept cookies with incorrect paths” and disable “Warn me about incorrect cookie paths”. I’ve never seen any examples of why I should care about incorrect paths.

Finally, I recommend that you enable “Use cookies to trace password protected pages” unless you do not have administrative control over your computer (i.e. if you use it in a school or business setting). Even then it’s probably being a bit paranoid to worry about any real security risk, and it makes life a little easier to have it enabled. Folks who are concerned for the highest levels of security should leave this turned off and should probably set Opera to delete cookies when exiting.