What are Cookies and how do they work?

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Cookies allow websites to "remember" information about the user and their preferences, which improves the visitor's experience on the site.

Typically, cookies are used to:

Maintaining authentication : Cookies can help sites determine whether a user is logged in , allowing them to access certain features without having to log in again.
Session persistence : Cookies are used to store data about the user's current session so that they can navigate the site without problems.
Saving preferences : Websites can save user preferences such kazakhstan email list as language, fonts, themes, etc. in cookies.
Saving purchase history : Cookies can be used to store information about products added to the basket or comparison, allowing users to continue shopping from where they left off.
Activity tracking : Cookies can be used to analyze user behavior on the site.
Cookies are used by advertising networks to deliver more relevant ads based on users' interests and behavior on sites.
A user session is the period of time during which a user interacts with a website, from the moment they enter the site until they exit. During a session on a site, a user can view pages, interact with content, perform various actions, add items to a shopping cart, leave comments, etc.

During a session, a special identifier known as a "session ID" is set on the site. This identifier is stored in browser cookies or transmitted via URL parameters and is used to link all user actions on the site within a single session.

Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user to ensure that they are who they claim to be. Authentication is based on credentials, such as a username and password, that a user provides to access a particular system or resource. For example, when you log into your account on a website, you provide your username and password. The server checks whether the data you provide matches the data stored in its database, and if it matches, you are considered an authenticated user and are granted access to your account.

Cookies were introduced in 1994 by Netscape Communications Corporation (now Mozilla Corporation) and their history is linked to the need to solve certain problems that arose with the development of the Internet, namely:

At the time, websites could not effectively determine that requests to the server were related to the same user session. This limited the ability to provide personalized services and required users to re-authenticate for each new request.
Websites wanted to be able to track user activity on their pages in order to analyze traffic, understand user preferences, and improve interfaces and content.
Online stores needed a way to preserve a user's selection of items in a shopping cart across different site pages and site visits.
Cookies were introduced as a solution to the above problems. When a user visited a website, the web server sent a small text file to the user's device (browser) with a unique identifier. This file, which we now know as a "cookie", was stored on the user's device and on subsequent visits to the same website, the browser automatically sent these cookies back to the server, allowing the website to identify the user and their previous actions on the website.