You might notice the option “Remember me” when trying to login to a website or forum.

The popular “Remember Me” feature seen on a lot of websites is basically used to keep users logged into the website even after they’ve closed the browser so that the next time they revisit the site, they won’t have to manually login again. When you enable Remember Me, the persistent login cookies are stored with your browser and the length of time that you’ll be logged in depends on how long the web developer decides to set. This is all happening between your browser and the server without you noticing it.

I am a registered user in most of social bookmarking websites and I had to manually login every week because the Remember Me feature only keeps me logged in for a week. I do not want to flood my Firefox password manager, so I decided to manually extend the browser’s cookie expiration date so that I don’t need to login every week.

Here’s how I extend Firefox and Internet Explorer cookie expiration date.

I only extend the cookie expiration date on websites that are NOT important to me. Meaning if my account got stolen or hacked, I don’t mind registering another one.

- For Mozilla Firefox browser.
You can use an excellent Firefox extension called “Add & Edit Cookies – Cookies Editor“. After installing Add N Edit Cookies, in your Firefox, go to Tools and select Cookie Editor. Locate the site that you want to extend the auto login period, and click Edit button.

Set the expire date to a future date and save it.

[ Install Add N Edit Cookies Firefox extension ]

- For Internet Explorer browser.
You can use a free tool called “IECookiesView” from Nirsoft. IECookiesView is a cookie viewer/manager for Internet Explorer. When you run IECookiesView, it will list out all your IE cookies. To edit the IE cookies, you first need to select the website on the top window first. Then you will see the Keys that appear at the bottom window. Right click on the key and select Edit The Cookie’s Content.

Set the expire date to a future date and click Modify Cookie button.

[ Download IECookiesView ]

Before you decide to extend your browser’s cookie expiration date, please take note that cookies are vulnerable. A persistent login cookie is equivalent of both a valid user name and password into 1 file which can be easily stolen. Other user accounts won’t be able to access your browser’s cookie but I’d always be on the safe side and only extend cookie expiration date IF I am the only person using the computer. Better safe than sorry!

[tags]cookie, expiry, expiration, extend, firefox[/tags]