Cookiebro - Help

Frequently Asked Questions

What are cookies?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Why should I use Cookiebro?

Cookies and other mechanisms can be used to track you online. Websites can create a unique fingerprint of your browser and that fingerprint can be then connected to your real personal data if the same tracking mechanism has been used on a site where you entered your real information. In other words websites can in some cases know your real identity even though you have never given them your information. Despite what you might think, you are not anonymous on the Internet even when you are not logged on to any service. Cookiebro will help you to drop all unwanted cookies and other data used for tracking.

Cookiebro also contains a simple but powerful Cookie Editor that lets you inspect, modify and create cookies. Great for developers.

Cookiebro can remove cookies regardless of their origin (also cookies that were set when another WebExtension accessed websites). Most other cookie manager extensions can only remove cookies when a tab is closed which is an unreliable method and often leaves behind also 3rd party cookies.

Cookiebro can whitelist/blacklist domains and even individual cookies.

How can websites track me?

There are multiple ways to track you online. One of the nastiest ways is to use evercookies which uses JavaScript to store identifying information about you not only by using cookies but various other ways as well. See the evercookie specification. You can combat evercookies by blacklisting cookies on all sites by default (*.*), checking "Enable blacklist filtering", ticking all auto-delete options, ETag and Link tag deletion and by using "Clear [domain] data" action in the popup menu after leaving a potentially tracking domain.

How should I configure my browser's Cookie and privacy settings?

If you want Cookiebro to take care of your cookies, you need to allow cookies in browser settings and disable automatic cookie related actions. If you set your browser to automatically delete cookies after the browser is closed, Cookiebro cannot protect the cookies on the whitelist.

Cookiebro cannot see or manage the browser's own cookie related whitelist so use just Cookiebro.

What happens to cookies by default right after installing Cookiebro?

By default nothing happens. Cookies are accepted and stored as before. They are classified as unwanted because no domain or cookie has been whitelisted yet. On Options page you can remove unwanted cookies manually or choose an option to delete unwanted cookies automatically at browser startup or periodically.

What is an "unwanted" cookie?

Any cookie that is not whitelisted, is classified as "unwanted". Unwanted cookies can be removed either manually, at browser start or periodically.

How can I whitelist/blacklist a domain?

You can use the Cookiebro popup menu to whitelist domains exactly or by wildcard. You can also enter domain names like addons.mozilla.org or wildcarded versions like *.mozilla.org to either whitelist or blacklist.

How can I block all cookies by default?

First check "Enable blacklist filtering" in Options. Then enter *.* to blacklist and press enter to add it.

Which is stronger - whitelist or blacklist?

If domain is whitelisted, cookies will be accepted from that domain even if there's a matching domain blacklist setting. So blacklisting *.* and whitelisting foobar.com would mean that foobar.com can set cookies but no other domain can. Similarly whitelisting a specific cookie takes precedence over blacklist settings. However, blacklisting a single cookie will take precedence over any other settings. So if you blacklist www.google.com/NID cookie, it will be always blocked regardless of any other settings.

What does popup menu action "Clear [domain] domain data" do?

By clicking that action Cookiebro will delete IndexedDB, localStorage, sessionStorage, cacheStorage, Service Workers of the domain defined by currently active tab. Note that Firefox doesn't yet support removing IndexedDB by site so on Firefox you can use "Clear Website Stored Data" on Options page but that removes data for all sites. As soon as Mozilla implements issue 934640, IndexedDB domain specific cleaning will automatically start to work.

What does "Clear Stored Website Data" button do?

When you click that button Cookiebro will remove indexeDB and localStorage on all websites and all other things that you have checked in "auto-delete" options. On Chrome it will also delete webSQL and cacheStorage by default. CacheStorage and webSQL cannot be deleted on Firefox due to lack of API options.

How can I blacklist/whitelist a single cookie?

You can whitelist/blacklist cookies e.g. in Cookie Log view. In Options view you can enter it in format [domain]/[cookieName] - e.g. www.google.com/NID
Wildcards are supported for the domain part so *.com/badCookie would work. Wilcards aren't supported for the cookie name though so it has to be an exact match.

Why isn't Cookiebro blocking any cookies?

Ensure you have "Enable blacklist filtering" enabled in Options and you have added proper settings to the blacklist settings (e.g. *.google.com).

Why doesn't Cookiebro remove cookies from all containers at start on Firefox?

Mozilla has not implemented chrome.cookies.getAllCookieStores() API properly for Firefox yet (2019-09-08). On Firefox the method will only return cookieStores of open tabs. When the browser is starting up, there are no open tabs yet. Hence Cookiebro cannot get proper information about all the cookieStores and cannot thus remove cookies that are not in the default firefox-default container. You can, however, remove cookies from any container as long as you just open one tab in the container and then open Cookiebro Options view. See Bugzilla issue 1578096.

I love Cookiebro! How can I help?

If you like Cookiebro, please recommend it to your friends as well. Donations are also highly appreciated (see Options page top right-hand corner).

Is Cookiebro open source?

No it is not. However, Cookiebro source code is not obfuscated or minified in any way so you can view it in your browser if you want to verify that it is 100 % safe and clean. The source code is fully copyrighted by Nodetics though.

Feedback and Bug Reports

Please send feedback and bug reports to nodetics@gmail.com

Change Log

Cookiebro change history is listed in Change Log.