What is a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of information that gets stored on the client side. It can either be temporary or permanent. A temporary or session cookie is valid only for one session. While a permanent cookie is valid for many sessions. There is also a default timeout for a cookie which is 30 minutes.

One can also turn off cookies on a page in a website. This is done using the Cookie Discard property. The discard flag is determined by the server using get or set options. So when this property is set to true, the Cookie does not get saved to the hard disk of the user at the end of one session.