10 Difference Between Cache And Cookies With Examples

What Is Cookie?

A HTTP cookie also referred to as internet cookie, browser cookie, web cookie or simply cookie, is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the user’s browser while the user is browsing.

While cookies serve many functions such as storage of password, preferences, browser, IP address data and time of visit etc, their main purpose is to store login information for a specific site. Some sites will save both your username and password in a cookie while others will only save your user name. Whenever you tick a box that says ‘’REMEMBER ME’’, the website will generate a login cookie once you successfully log in. Now, every time you revisit the website, you may only require to enter your password or you might not need to enter your password at all.

There are two different types of cookies, that is session and persistent.

• Session cookies are temporary and are deleted when the browser is closed. These type of cookies are normally used by e-commerce sites to store items placed in your shopping cart and can serve many other purposes as well.
• Persistent cookies are meant to store data for an extended period of time. Normally, each persistent cookie is created with an expiration date, which can be from a few weeks to several months.

What You Need To Know About Cookie

1. A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the web browser.
2. Cookies stores information such as user preferences, session number, password, user history, number of pages visited, IP address etc.
3. Cookies expire automatically after a given period of time.
4. The main purpose of cookie is to store user choices.
5. Cookies are used to store information to track different activities related to the user.
6. Cookie is a text file; therefore it does not consume much space on client machine.
7. Cookies can be up to 4KB (4096 bytes) in size and a website can send 50 cookies on the computer, and the number of total cookies can be at least 3000.
8. Cookie is a simple text file and therefore it is not possible for it to contain any virus or malicious data.
9. There are two types of cookies, that is persistent cookie and session cookie.
10. Cookie sends the response with requests.

What Is Cache?

A web cache also referred to as HTTP cache or simply cache is a software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. Whenever you visit any website for the first time, its page elements are downloaded and stored in a cache folder and if you have already visited that website, its elements might already exist in the cache folder. Consequently, this helps pages to load faster and improves your browsing speed.

Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome use a browser cache to improve performance of frequently accessed webpage. When you visit a webpage, the requested files are stored in your computing storage in the browser’s cache.

Generally, computers incorporate several different types of caching in order to run more efficiently, thereby improving performance. Common types of caches include: browser cache, memory cache, processor cache and disk cache.

What You Need To Know About Cache

1. Cache also referred to as web cache is a temporary storage of web documents such as HTML pages and images to reduce server lag.
2. Web cache stores resource files such as script files, images, banners, audio, video, flash files etc.
3. A cache is stored in the client’s machine until when the user removes it manually.
4. The main purpose of cache is to store website content for long term purposes.
5. Cache is used to make the loading of web pages faster.
6. Cache can store different type of data, therefore it consumes large amount of space on client machine.
7. The size of cache depends on the limit by browser. You can increase the size to store more temporary files using browser’s settings.
8. Cache stores different types of data and therefore possibility is high that it can have a virus or malicious data.
9. . Common types of caches include: browser cache, memory cache, processor cache and disk cache.
10. Cache does not send the response with requests.

Also Read: Difference Between Data And Information

Between Cache And Cookies In Tabular Form

Also Read: Difference Between Structured And Unstructured Data