Cookies

You may be sitting on the fence about whether to upgrade to Internet Explorer 6 or Netscape 6. If cookie management is one of your primary concerns, you can get better cookie management in both products. In older versions of both products, you can turn cookies on or off - but you can't manage them. In the two new versions, you can set them up to accept cookies from certain sources and reject cookies from other sources. So you gain a greater amount of privacy when you surf.

You may not want all the other features of these upgrades - or you might not want to go through the massive downloads required to get them. In this case, consider using a special cookie management software. Cindy Harris says she uses Cookie Pal. Whenever it comes across new cookies from sources it has never seen, it alerts her - and it can learn whether to accept cookies based on whether you have accepted them before.

• Cookie Pal