When you think of a cookie, you probably imagine the food.
Warm. Soft. Delicious… Yum yum.
Unfortunately, the cookies I’m talking about here are nowhere near as exciting. You can’t eat them. They don’t crumble. They don’t go well with tea. Internet cookies are more like… tiny, invisible sticky notes your browser collects whether it likes it or not.
“So David, what are they then?!”
Ahem….
A cookie is basically a small piece of data stored by websites. Most of the time, they’re harmless little things that help the site remember who you are and what you were doing. Think of signing in to a website without cookies, every time you clicked a link or refreshed the page, you’d be kicked out and asked to sign in again.
Very frustrating. I know.
Cookies keep things running smoothly: your login info, what’s in your shopping basket, your theme preferences, your “I’m dark mode till I die” setting… That kind of stuff.
So why am I here, ominously calling this “The death of the internet cookie” like I’m narrating a crime documentary on Netflix?
These are third-party cookies.
Imagine you’re shopping at Tesco, but someone from Asda is following you, taking notes, and then shouting “HEY! I SAW YOU LOOKING AT LASAGNE! WANT MORE LASAGNE?” the next time you’re online.
That’s basically how online ads have worked for years…
Naturally, people got annoyed. Governments got annoyed. and browsers got annoyed.
So big tech companies Google, Mozilla, Apple started cracking down. Safari and Firefox block third-party cookies by default. Google Chrome (the big boss of browsers) promised to phase them out too… although Google has delayed that, then delayed the delay, then delayed the delay of the delay… you get the picture.
But wait…. does that mean the internet breaks?
Here’s the funny part: removing cookies doesn’t mean everything suddenly collapses. Websites aren’t going to transform into cave paintings. But it does mean companies need new ways to track things, run ads, handle logins, and generally keep the internet from having an existential crisis.
Some of these replacements sound cool:
Local storage
Privacy Sandbox (Google’s “trust me bro” solution)
First-party data
Some random server-side magic
Others sound… concerning. But that’s probably for another article I’ll write in about 3–6 months.
So… are cookies really dying?
Yep. Well, kind of.
The old creepy ones are being pushed out. The functional ones — the nice cookies that help you stay logged in — are staying.
It’s less “death of the cookie” and more “cookie diet.”
Less tracking, fewer creepy ads, more privacy.
But also more companies scrambling to rebuild their entire ad systems.
Fun times.
Final thoughts…
Cookies changed how the modern internet works. Now we’re watching them slowly fade away… replaced by newer, supposedly less creepy tech. Whether that’s good or bad depends on who you ask.
For users? Probably good. For advertisers? They’re crying somewhere.
And for me? I’m going to get a cookie.
Side note: I know that we Brits call them biscuits, but I’m using cookie here because that’s what the Internet likes to call them…
Maybe one day a British language pack will come to Chrome… One day…
