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I was recently working with a friend who was talking with a company's tech support about a problem he was having with the company's website. Almost immediately I heard something that made me cringe.

After listening to the description of the problem, the tech support person immediately told my friend to delete his cookies.

Deleting your browser cookies to fix a problem with a website is like tearing down your house to get rid of a crack in the wall. It may solve your problem but it is way overkill.

Here's what you should really do if someone asks you to delete your cookies.

Cookies are small files that websites write to your hard drive to store information that the site can access later. If you have heard cookies discussed lately, it is probably in terms of privacy and tracking your browsing. Cookies are indeed used for tracking but they have very good and practical uses as well like remembering your user name and preferences for a website.

For more info on the good and bad of cookies, check this out.

When you encounter a webpage that doesn't work properly, the problem is usually that the website doesn't work properly with the browser you are using. I occasionally run into websites that don't work right with Safari. If a website isn't working properly, the first thing to try is another browser. I keep Firefox on my Mac for those websites.

If a website used to work for you but you are suddenly having problems with it, it may indeed be a cookie problem. The thing is, to fix the problem, you want to delete the cookies from that website. Cookies for other websites aren't going to be causing you problems.

When someone tells you to delete all your cookies, they are taking the easy way out. It's just a couple more steps to delete the cookies for a single website:

1. Close out the website you are trying to fix.
2. Go to Safari's Preferences.
3. Go to the Privacy view.
4. Skip over the Remove All Website Data... button and click the Details... button.
5. Scroll through the list of websites that store cookies until you to the website you are trying to troubleshoot.
6. Select the website name and click Remove.

Go back to the website and see if the problem is fixed. All of your preferences for the website will be gone so you may have to log in or do things like choose your country or language.

Disclosure: Basics4Mac.com saves cookies, but they aren't storing anything interesting about you.

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