Cookie limits in browsers

How many cookies do you neeed and how many does the browsers support? - It seem to come up all to often, so after a bit of digging in search engines, here are (for my own convenience) the findings of what the limits are on cookies in the currently used browsers.

The cookie standard (RFC2965) specifies a browser should be able to handle at least 20 cookies per domain, but one thing is a standard - who does the real world look?

Internet Explorer

  • Version 6 supports 20 cookeis.
  • Version 7 supports 20 cookies - updated to 50 in an August ‘07 patch.
  • Version 8 is supposed to support 50 cookies, but haven’t shipped at the time of writing.

Firefox

  • Firefox allws 50 cookies.

Opera

  • Allows 50 cookies.

Cheating (slightly - if you must)

Since it’s per domain (and remembering you can’t place cookies on the top level domain (.dk, .com or whatever) you can on many sites actually double the number of cookies available if you must. The key (or trick if you like) is to utilize the fact that most sites are located at www.example.com and you can place 20 cookies on example.com and another 20 on www.example.com.

Before doing this, do check with your server admin though, that requests to example.com is always redirected to the www-subdomain.

Selected Sources