Before the internet came along, cookies were what we Brits knew as American biscuits and the weakness of that distinguished member of Sesame Street, the Cookie Monster. Then Netscape began, invented one of the world's first web browsers and eventually, invented the concept of HTTP cookies that are now an essential part of virtually all browsers. From the very start, cookies were controversial because they raised some of the first serious invasion of privacy issues for internet users. Should any website be able to leave behind data on your PC that a website can recognise at a later date, even if it facilitates your user experience? Of course, most people don't mind this as long as there is nothing malicious involved.

It's when the cookies that are left behind are of a more devious or harmful nature that the problems begin. There are still a lot of misconceptions about what cookies are and are not. This useful FAQ delves into the issue in a lot more detail but if you're the kind of person who doesn't want to risk any breach of your privacy, no matter what the cookies are for, then you may need to use one of these dedicated cookie cleaners: Powerful Cookies - Deletes and destroy all cookies including typed URL's Cookie Viewer - Allows you to pick and choose which cookies to delete

Expired Cookie Cleaner - Gets rid of those long-term cookies that others leave behind

Delete Cookies - Designed especially to get rid of those cookies that target Internet Explorer

Cookie Monster - Manage cookies stored across multiple browsers on your system

Google is easily the most powerful search engine on the net. As the company has grown though, users have become increasingly concerned about the privacy issues raised by one company handling so much personal data. This was brought into the spotlight again last month by Google's unifying new privacy policy which gives it more rights to share your Google activities across services it owns such as YouTube, Google+ and of course, Google Search.

The good news is there are several other options out there that pro-actively protect your privacy. And some of them are pretty good too. Below, I test the best four options using a search term 'internet explorer mac' that consistently ranks Softonic highly in Google.

Ever wondered how some websites seem to know so much about you as soon as you arrive? Or are you concerned about the amount of tracking that some websites do nowadays?

Until I installed Do Not Track Plus, I had no idea of the extent that sites go to to track you on the internet. Within seconds of logging onto MSN's site for example, it revealed six different companies that wanted to track my profile and surfing habits on the net:

Internet Explorer 9 is finally available for download. Microsoft has released the final version of their popular browser for Windows 7 and Windows Vista, both in 32 and 64-bit versions. You can download them all from Softonic.

There are no significant changes since the Release Candidate we tested a few weeks ago. But we thought it would be a good idea to go over the most outstanding features in Internet Explorer 9 once more, especially for those of you who haven’t been testing the previous versions (Platform Preview, Beta and RC).

Web Slices

Internet Explorer 9 lets you add special web elements like top lists to the browser's Favorites bar. These elements are known as Web Slices and their content is updated automatically.

Windows: if you use online file storage services such as Google Docs or Amazon S3 but don't like their user interfaces, Gladinet is the app you need. This tool mounts your online storage accounts on your system as virtual drives, meaning you can handle your online data just as if they were regular files and folders on your hard drive.

Mac: Cleaning your Mac in a few easy steps is easy with Mac Cleanse - a small yet powerful application geared towards purifying your system. In only seconds, it can perform over fifty tasks which would take nearly an hour to perform manually. Safely erasing caches, logs, cookies, histories, and more. Mac Cleanse won't miss a thing and could reclaim hundreds of megabytes of storage space.

iPhone: If you don't like the idea of your music being locked within the confines of your PC or Mac then why not use Simplify Media to stream it to your iPhone? Simplify Media turns your phone into a streaming server, allowing you to access your music from any other Net-enabled machine. You just install Simplify Media onto the computer where the audio files are stored and you can then access it via the iTunes library on another machine.

After having successfully launched their own webmail service, RSS reader, online suite and many other apps, having a Google web browser was only a question of time.

Google Chrome has joined the so called web browser battle with a neatly designed web browser which, in spite of being still at a development stage, already shows a lot of potential.

The first thing that caught my attention when launching Google Chrome for the first time was its minimalist design. Besides a couple of bars and a couple of buttons, there's nothing else on the interface to steal screen space from the websites you visit – not even a status bar, as it automatically shows and hides whenever it's necessary.