Clear Out Those Unwanted Cookies in Chrome
Website cookies are used with your web browser to store data on your computer related to that website. They are small files that are kept in a directory on your local hard drive. These cookies are used to keep information on things such as your username, password, address and other customized settings used for your session.
While cookies handle session persistence (keeping you logged in), they can sometimes become corrupted. When a site fails to load correctly or gets stuck in a redirect loop, clearing the specific ‘session tokens’ stored in these cookies often resolves the issue immediately without the need for a full browser reset.. Then the next time you go to that website, your browser will send the cookie to the Web server and all of your saved information will be ready for you. Session cookies are only kept until you close your web browser and then they are deleted. Persistent cookies are kept on your computer until they expire or until they are deleted by you. Cookies are generally ok but sometimes you can get some from websites with bad intentions that are trying to track your web browsing to create a profile about your browsing habits to be used for advertising purposes and so on.
Cookies are generally easy to remove but one problem with deleting all of your cookies is that it will remove information from other websites that you might want to have saved. So what do you do if you want to remove the cookie from just one website? Well, if you are a Google Chrome user then its pretty easy to do. The first thing you need to do is go to your Google Chrome settings. This can be done by clicking on the 3 vertical dots at the top right of the browser window and then clicking on Settings.
Next you will need to scroll down to the Advanced section and click on the Find Content settings.
Then you will need to click on Cookies under Content settings.
Then click on See all cookies and site data.
Finally you will see all of the stored cookies used by Chrome on your computer. You can then scroll down the list until you see the cookie or cookies for the site you want to delete and then click the trash can icon to delete them. Notice how there is a Remove All button as well which will remove all of the stored cookies on your computer. There is also a Search cookies box that will let you find cookies only for certain sites so you don’t have to browse through the entire listing of cookies which in most cases will be quite long.
Once you delete the cookies from the website you wanted to clear out, the next time you go to that website it will be like you are going there for the first time.
Modern web apps often store data in Local Storage or IndexedDB rather than just standard cookies. If clearing cookies doesn’t fix the site, use the Chrome DevTools (F12). Go to the Application tab, select Storage on the left, and click Clear site data. This is the ‘nuclear option’ for a single website that ensures every piece of cached data is purged.
Update – The fastest way to clear cookies for a specific site is to do it directly from the address bar. Click the ‘tune’ or ‘lock’ icon to the left of the URL, select Cookies and site data, and then click Manage on-device site data. From here, you can delete the specific site’s storage without ever leaving the page.
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