How do I view cookies in Internet Explorer 11 using Developer Tools

Question

I'm looking for how to view the cookies set using developer tools in IE11. I see an option in network profiling to view cookies being sent back and forth, but this is not really the same thing. It is cumbersome to use since it's per request. Surely there must be a way to view all cookies like you can in IE10.

Bascio

Now sure why anyone would vote to close this question. It's a question about a "developer tool" which is barely documented on the internet. I've looked through it completely and I've read all the documentation I could find online and see nothing about a standard cookie view that was present in IE10. – Bascio

It would be nice to know this. Leave it to Microsoft to give you a bunch of new tools that do a bunch of stuff you rarely need and take away the old and useful ones. This is highly frustrating. – Cati

I filed an issue with Microsoft Connect and they confirmed that this feature is not available. – Bascio

"Surely there must be a way ...", yeah, right ... new to microsoft, huh ? – Candlepin

Microsoft is totally out of tune with developers apparently. How they ever made a great product like Visual Studio is beyond me. I've given up and moved exclusively to Chrome for debugging. – Bascio

@KingOfHypocrites, can you provide a link to the Connect issue so we can vote on it? – Amalberga

The closest I've been able to get to viewing the cookies is to view all the files in your "browsing history," which includes cookies. This can be accessed at Internet Options->General->Browsing History tab->Settings->Temporary Internet Files tab->View files. There's a column for "Internet Address" which gives the originating URL, which allows you to group the cookies for a particular site together. Cookies all appear to have an internet address that starts with "cookie:" and ends in the domain name of the origin. – Amalberga

@Amalberga Here it is: connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/808391/… – Bascio

yeah, it could be much better. If you're using jquery.cookie then type $.cookie() in the Developer Tools console. Not ideal but I find it useful. – Helfrich

Once upon a time in the old days :) there was a firebug lite js to provide devtool for IE6 . I checked it and it doesn't have something for cookie. I'm not sure but Fiddler may provide some tool but I don't suppose the cookie to be editable/deletable (I'm looking for it too) – Bisexual

Answer 1

1. Click on the Network button
2. Enable capture of network traffic by clicking on the green triangular button in top toolbar
3. Capture some network traffic by interacting with the page
4. Click on DETAILS/Cookies
5. Step through each captured traffic segment; detailed information about cookies will be displayed

Biles

This is the same approach I mentioned in my question and is not the same as seeing all cookies across all requests in a static manner. – Bascio

This doesn't give you the current state of the browsers cookie store. You could re-construct what the browser should have with the network tool, but like a lot of devs i need to test functionality when a cookie goes missing or is corrupted. – Adolescent

Agree that this is not the best approach (and MS should fix this)... But to get current state you can do a manual request through the console. For jQuery: $.get('/');, for ExtJS: Ext.Ajax.request({url: '/'});. Note that this should work even if the page does not exists (i.e. answer is 404). You might want to change the url so that you not break anything in your app ;-). – Oleomargarine

Will this enable cookies for the user? I was troubleshooting a cookie-related issue on a user's machine via a remote session and after I enabled this I could no longer reproduce the issue... When I switched it off, the cookies were still going through. So it seems that observing cookies changes the cookie settings? – Backcross

The issue with this answer is that with IE we can't save the requests history on the Network tab. Meaning if there's a redirection (like with OAuth2) we can't check the cookies because we've lost all previous HTTP requests – Suburbicarian

Answer 2

How about typing document.cookie into the console? It just shows the values, but it's something.

Selfgovernment

It lacks all the details like cookie path, cookie domain, etc. – Hanser

Answer 3

Update 2018 for Microsoft Edge Developer Tools

The Dev Tools in Edge finally added support for managing and browsing cookies.

Note: Even if you are testing and supporting IE targets, you mine as well do the heavy lifting of your browser compatibility testing by leveraging the new tooling in Edge, and defer checking in IE 11 (etc) for the last leg.

Debugger Panel > Cookies Manager

Network Panel > Request Details > Cookies

The benefit, of course, to the debugger tab is you don't have to hunt and peck for individual cookies across multiple different and historical requests.

Schoolmarm

Jeeez.... Well, I guess this kind of explains why, whenever I've finished installing Windows 10 on a new laptop, my first port of call is to go and download Chrome. Microsoft just doesn't do user-friendly very well, do they...? ;-) – Rodolphe

@MikeGledhill, it's not that it's terrible, it's just that chrome's is better. Chrome has iterated and focused so much on developer tools in the browser. I think it's paid off for them, but they get better every 6 weeks and continue to build on developer-centric feature after feature. – Schoolmarm

Answer 4

Sorry to break the news to ya, but there is no way to do this in IE11. I have been troubling with this for some time, but I finally had to see it as a lost course, and just navigate to the files manually.

But where are the files? That depends on a lot of things, I have found them these places on different machines:

In the the Internet Explorer cache.

This can be done via "run" (Windows+r) and then typing in shell:cache or by navigating to it through the internet options in IE11 (AskLeo has a fine guide to this, I'm not affiliated in any way).

• Click on the gear icon, then Internet options.
• In the General tab, underneath “Browsing history”, click on Settings.
• In the resulting “Website Data” dialog, click on View files.
• This will open the folder we’re interested in: your Internet Explorer cache.

Make a search for "cookie" to see the cookies only

In the Cookies folder

The path for cookies can be found here via regedit:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Cookies

Common path (in 7 & 8)

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low

Common path (Win 10)

shell:cookies

shell:cookies\low

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCookies

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCookies\Low

Suppliant

Unfortunately, this does not give you the session cookies. – Weichsel

Answer 5

I think I found what you are looking for since I was also looking for it.

You have to follow Pawel's steps and then go to the key that is "Cookie". This will open a submenu with all the cookies and it specifies their name, value, domain, etc...

Respectively the values are: Key, Value, Expiration Date, Domain, Path.

This shows all the keys for this domain.

So again to get there:

1. Go to Network.
2. Capture Traffic, green triangle.
3. Go to Details.
4. Go to the "Cookie" key that has a gibberish value. (_utmc=xxxxx;something=ajksdhfa) etc...

Belloc

This is the same approach mentioned in the question. The question is about viewing a static representation of all cookies in IE 11. – Moll

@Moll How are the other answers different from the approach mentioned in the question? (With the exception of document.cookie in the console) – Belloc

@Joze anyway your solution is not suitable to see all set of cookies that browser has for all sites. What is needed is something like cookie manager – Ahoy

@Ahoy The fact that something better is needed (something that doesn't exist) doesn't invalidate my answer. You would need a much better reason to downvote. – Belloc

@Joze your aswer is not an answer. The same way you gan go here and paste knowledge how to get user agent string in this post. Wil it be an answer? Should it be downvoted? If you still disagree with me then please write what is a much better reason to downvote. – Ahoy

@Ahoy My answer IS an answer. The question is how to view cookies using developer tools. Plus, it's not copy paste, I gave additional insight on how to see the other cookies, ie. what the OP wanted. A valid reason to downvote is an incorrect answer, an incorrect workaround or something that has nothing to do with the question, a link only answer... look at the FAQ if you need more details about what is not a good answer. I've been posting here for years look at the rep. Whereas yours, doesn't say much about what you know. – Belloc

the IE's dev tool does not show expires value for the cookies. any idea how can I get this value? – Letaletch

Muhammad, an IE cookie with empty/NULL "expires" expires with the session. – Rodrick

I didn't downvote, but I expect duplicated answer to be downvoted. And saying "I've been posting here for years look at the rep" looks arrogant. – Hanser

Answer 6

Not quite an answer (not “using Developer Tools”), but there is a third-party tool for it: IECookiesView from NirSoft. Hope this helps someone.

_{image taken from Softpedia}

Hanser

Answer 7

I know this is and old question, but this is for future developers, just wanting a quick and dirty way to get an overview.

You could go to the "console" panel and type in document.cookie to get a raw overview of all the cookies at the current location.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/cookie

Denominate

As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. – Shilling