By Benjamin Hurst, Platinum Educational Group
Many computer users use cache and cookies and never realize what they do. When navigating to a site, it may ask you to accept the use of its cookies, which is intended to make the user experience better. For example, if you have a site where you can customize a view and you did approve cookies, it will likely load that same view when you return the next time, reducing the work you have to put in to replicate what you already did.
Here at Platinum Educational Group, we also implement cookies on our website. In EMSTesting, if you select View Gradebook as an instructor, you will see all exams listed from oldest to newest. If you change that filter, a cookie gets saved, and the next time you visit the grade book, the view will be the same as you left it. We also utilize session cookies to help remember where you left off. These cookies disappear after you leave the session/exit the browser. When you sort your classes by upcoming, current, or closed in EMSTesting, the site remembers the one you selected. If you navigate to another page within EMSTesting and return to the homepage, it will still show the tab you left off on.
However, there are times when a webpage might not load properly, glitch, or fail to load correctly. This is when we recommend that a customer clear their cache and cookies. It can fix many work issues, even those that are not work-related. A basic example is Mozilla Firefox. In the upper right, select the 3 horizontal lines, navigate to History, select Clear Recent History, and then deselect everything besides Cache and Cookies to maintain the other data you want. Select a time frame at the top and then clear now. This is an example of one of the many browsers out there. You can search “How to clear my browser's cache and cookies on {browser name}” and get the desired results.
Overall, cookies can be very versatile and valuable in many cases. We use them to help reduce the amount of clicks a user has to perform to complete a task. Cookies are easy to clean up if the webpage is acting up with a simple search and minor interaction.