This review is done and written by Corker, one of our Forum Members. Thanks to him for the review.

Greetings, Avinashtech Readers! Today we have another giveaway for you. 10 licenses for MAXA Cookie Manager are on the table for ten lucky people to bring them home. But let’s not rush in, shall we? Spare your moment to read the following notes before joining the raffle.

Unless we are browsing the Internet in stealth, Incognito or Private Browsing session (or whatever the name is), every websites we pay a visit shall place cookies onto our computer and retains them. Web cookies are relatively small amount of textual data stored on our computer by our web browser. Site administrators benefit from cookies mainly as to statistic purposes while toward users, cookies play role as saving preferences, shopping cart contents, or login session information. Simply put, cookies create mutually symbiotic interaction between both website owners and visitors.

But that is the case with traditional HTTP cookies. As the world wide web moves forward, so does cookies. Advanced cookies like Flash cookie and DOM storage now come up with the capability of storing large volume of information and long expiry time which may bring harm to user’s privacy and security. The potential threats from cookies grow from browsing activity tracking as well as detailed user profile creating to confidential data leak. With the number of cookies may reach up to thousands, the demand for cookie management software rises.

MAXA Cookie Manager, an application developed by MAXA Research Int’l Inc., allows us to prevent harm which might be caused by cookies. Type of cookies handled by MAXA Cookie Manager:

  • HTTP cookies
  • Special browser dependent cookies (IE-User Data DOM and Firefox DOM Storage)
  • Browser independent cookies (Flash and Silverlight cookies)
  • Special Products dependent cookies (Skype cookies)
  • Plus Evercookies and Web bugs.

By the first time we install MAXA Cookie Manager, a semi-automatic wizard will show up and guide us through the correct configuration. MAXA Cookie Manager supports most major browsers including (but not limited to) Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Apple Safari. I say not limited because users are given with freedom to integrate a particular browser manually by taking advantage from path made for portable browsers. As long as you know where the required Cookies file of the corresponding browser is stored on your computer, then you can turn MAXA Cookie Manager to work on your favor with other Mozilla-based and Chromium-based browsers.

This is MAXA Cookie Manager main interface.

As you can see for yourself, it is filled up by many buttons and counters. Do not fret though because they are easy to understand. The counters at the top show the number of cookies that have been recorded as from MAXA Cookie Manager initial run to current. The list at the center gives us some details about cookies which are currently being active on our computer, involving where a cookie was generated from, its size, its duration time, and what browser has generated it. This is great since most browsers do not provide clear details about cookies natively. And if they do, likely it is quite difficult to understand.

At the lower part are buttons by which we are able to perform cookie management. To manage cookies starts with evaluating them. The picture below describes how MAXA Cookie Manager analyzes cookies based on the level of possible harm.

The red-colored are cookies categorized as Web bugs (tracking cookies), the yellow ones are cookies with long expiry time including non-expiring Flash cookies, and the green are HTTP cookies which are usually safe. We are encouraged to delete and blacklist the red marks per cookie basis so it will not place other cookies onto our computer in the future, or even completely block per domain if we do not recognize the domain name at all. On the contrary, cookies from any trusted sites should be whitelisted. The whitelisted cookies will be shown in white color in evaluation. Furthermore, all list, including the black/whitelist, can be exported and imported into HTML files so we can restore them in case reinstalling Windows.

In addition to delete cookies, MAXA Cookie Manager can also clean browser history and cache. While they are not as risky as cookies, history and cache may provide the room for Evercookies (a breed of cookie which is hard to expel) to persist.

Two additional features named Online Privacy Test and Cookie diagnostics are also at our disposal. Online Privacy Test reveals what kind of data around us a cookie is able to generate while Cookie diagnostics consults MAXA Research database for suspicion of a certain cookie. Both need online connection to MAXA server beforehand.

That said, there is something I find weighing with MAXA Cookie Manager. The program suffers from typos! At first, I came upon one typo on the official sites. As the developer is actually a German company, I thought it was pretty normal for the extent. But then I discovered three other typos inside the interface. The last one I spot on is even a rather major one. They erroneously typed Chrome with Safari in cache cleaning progress. Even though English is not my mother tongue myself but still it feels ridiculous to me. I hope they will fix this as soon as possible on the upcoming database release.

Conclusion

MAXA Cookie Manager is useful tool for everyone and worth to have even if you are not that type of person who pays much concern about your privacy. All you need to do is to set it to start with Windows, drop a few trusted sites into whitelist, and delete all Cookies outside whitelist automatically. And that’s it!

MAXA Cookie Manager is presented in two flavors, Standard and Pro. Differences between the two are access for advanced cookie management like black/whitelisting and deletion of special cookies in Pro edition. You can download MAXA Cookie Manager Standard freely while MAXA Cookie Manager Pro demands you to buy a license in advance.

Giveaway

Thanks to MAXA Research Int’l Inc., we are giving away 10 license keys for MAXA Cookie Manager Pro for readers of Avinashtech. Just follow the simple rules below to enter in this draw..

  1. Subscribe to Avinashtech by entering your email address in the subscribe box on right sidebar of the blog or by clicking this link. Do remember to verify your email address when you get the verification email from Feedburner.
  2. Like the Facebook Fan Page of Avinashtech (If you don’t have a Facebook account you can skip this).
  3. Leave a comment below telling us why you need it. (Avoid using twitter, Facebook login to comment as I wont be able to get your email address to send you a email in case you win).
  4. Share this on Twitter, Facebook. (If you have an account there).