Cookie Stumbler review

When the Web was young, experts generally advised that browser cookies were harmless. That was before detailed user tracking across multiple sites and aggressive advertising targeting. You may appreciate the cookie that logs you into Amazon.com automatically, but you might be less eager to share your browsing habits with companies building detailed user profiles. Cookie Stumbler Standard finds browser cookies, including advertising and tracking ones, and gives you the option to delete them all, or inspect and banish them individually.

Like antivirus software, Cookie Stumbler combines an application with a subscription to regularly updated definition files. These definitions identify known advertising and tracking cookies, and delete them, based on your preferences. Cookie Stumbler currently supports ten browsers, including Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, iCab, and OmniWeb. It also scans Flash cookies set by Adobe Flash Player; flash cookies are not removed by a browser cleaning, even if Flash was invoked by a website.

The first time you run Cookie Stumbler, it scans your Mac for browsers and their associated cookie databases, reporting back all of the cookies it finds and suggesting which ones are undesirable. You can follow its recommendations, and scroll through the complete list to inspect all cookies found on your Mac. Cookie Stumbler notes each cookie-setting domains status; bookmarked, secure, advertising-related. blacklist, or keeplist. The blacklist and keeplist settings are suggested by Cookie Stumbler when it scans. You can override each one manually, if you wish, or double-click a domain to see what Cookie Stumblers site advisor feature has to say about it. An inspector gives you even more information about the domains cookies. If youre way into cookies, the inspector is quite useful, giving you a window into exactly what each cookie is doing.