Company
Date Published
Author
Rachel Hollander
Word count
382
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

When visiting websites, users often encounter prompts to accept cookies, which are small pieces of data stored in browsers to personalize experiences by remembering preferences like language and shopping cart contents. HTTP cookies are a type of web storage that helps servers recall information across requests, while web storage, used by JavaScript, offers greater capacity and functions invisibly to servers. There are two main types: local storage, which persists across browser sessions, and session storage, which is temporary. Advanced forms of web storage include IndexedDB for large data and Evercookies and Zombie cookies, which are persistent and challenging to delete. For web scraping, understanding cookies and web storage can help bypass blocking techniques, with IP addresses being a unique identifier that can be masked using proxy networks.