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As many people know now, web sites can put small packets of information on your computer, called "cookies," and they do this for various reasons. Sometimes it's to save your password on a site, but sometimes it's to track ads you've seen and products you've purchased.

A lot of people seem to want to know how to see what "cookies" have been placed on their computer, and what pages have placed the cookies there. And while they're at it, delete some or all of them. Here is how to see and modify various kinds of cookies:

Flash Cookies
These are the ones that you may have heard of that are "hard" to remove. Well, you can't remove them using the instructions below for normal cookies, but they're not that hard.

Go to this Adobe web site in your browser of choice, and start selecting and deleting Flash cookies. You can delete them all, or pick and choose.

You don't need to download anything -- the app on the page is a Flash app, and it lets you delete the cookies right there.

FireFox Cookies
Go to the Options menu, select the "privacy" tab, and then select "remove individual cookies". From there you can either remove them all or select ones to remove.

There's also an add-on called BetterPrivacy that will automatically delete Flash cookies when you quit FireFox.

Google Chrome
Select the wrench icon in the upper right corner, and click on "Options". From that screen, select "Under the Hood" on the left, and click on "Content Settings." From the Content Settings screen, click on "All cookies and site data...", and you can see all the cookies and remove some or all of them from that screen.

Internet Explorer
There are different instructions for IE 6, 7, and 8, which are all listed on this page.