Naw, these are extremely frustrating. They make navigating websites super difficult for anyone using a screen reader. Websites are supposed to have a certain level of accessibility by law that 97% of them don’t follow.
I wish I could toggle a switch natively in firefox (without a fishy extension) to set a flag, that sites have to respect/follow. Cookie banner are only the frontend result of something that could be implemented in software. In the same way as the EU can make everyone follow these rules or get fined, they could extend the rules to acknowledge my set flag automatically in the browser or get fined. Maybe in the future… I can’t believe my children will still have to click deny on every website in the year 2030.
There is consent-o-matic for Firefox which will answer these for you to say reject everything. It is run by a team in a Danish University.
Do you know why it is so badly reviewed? 4.3 is not that high. I skimmed the reviews and saw some people say it only works 30% of the time and another said it “does not work in FF but in Brave” (so relatively sure its just a astroturfing comment). I see they have a github, so I could go the way of reading the JS code and package it myself into a extension somehow that never updates, but that is easier said than done.
I really wish there were more ways to trust extensions. There are so many shady extensions who update in the background and insert malicious code on a later state when they gained track, that it is really hard for me to trust any of them. Eespecially when those Extension ask for nothing less than all my data on all my visited websites. For this reason I really would like to see this implemented natively in FF and not via an extension. Extensions are good for edge cases. The GDPR consent request is not an edge case. It is something everyone has to click several times a day. This is screaming for a permanent solution.
I think I just saw a post earlier where someone noticed in the latest Android FF nightly there was an option for this built in. Maybe it will be available for desktop soon (or maybe it already is?)
Edit: oh look the guy below talked about it and you replied 🫣
Firefox nightly (the beta version of firefox) has been testing a native cookie denier. So we will probably get it soon.
This is the best thing I heard all day. Thank you!
This was a thing already, it was called Do-Not-Track
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/DNT
Firefox tied it in to their existing Tracking Protection. Not sure how or if Chrome implemented it. Websites ignored the flag as you’d sadly expect, so it’s been deprecated
That’s slightly different and more often than not completely ignored. This is a better alternative: https://feddit.nl/comment/1153941.
That already exist: https://community.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/firefox-cookie-banner-handling/. There is also a flag to enable it in the GUI (to let it appear in the settings).
That’s not a annoying one. One click to disagree.
Yes, those banners were hard-won and are great.
I wonder if anyone’s made a plugin that autofills them.
Edit: Yep, looks like beta Firefox has it natively.
But that one isn’t that annoying, it’s a simple one click agree/disagree by the look of it
They are legally required to have that banner. Sorry.
What if the website doesn’t use cookies?
OK, replying to myself here rather than individually, as it seemed easier… Maybe I should have posted this to c/mildlyironic, but that’s what caught my attention. There’s no easy way to specify what I consent too here—their ToS, tracking cookies, it’s all or nothing†. And this is a legal requirement only if you’re storing cookies. If your website will work without cookies, just get rid of them instead of asking. If it won’t, make this the landing page and see how much traffic you get (note this would also help with accessibility).
I do use consent-o-matic, but it didn’t help with this one. Never mind, I’m no stranger to devtools, and see this eventually as just a challenge. This site though was pretty tricky. First usual trick is to right click and ‘Inspect’ the overlay, with a view to, ahem, closing it. But this isn’t gadgethacks first rodeo—no, they have a page level click handler installed which repeats the small print, and ends with a double negative “If you do not agree, click Cancel”. There’s no way back to read the ToS or privacy policy without reloading the page.
Oh well, lets start again and open devtools. The content is structured in 3 main bits: a
<header>
, a<section class="page-wrapper">
and a<footer>
. Well, that’s not too bad, so we can safely delete the header & footer, and that also gets rid of the click handler. Now just a simple matter or finding whereoverflow: hidden
is buried (only 1 div down), and a peskyposition: fixed
alongside it, and voila we have scroll bars.I could read all the way to the end of the article, and guess what? It didn’t need cookies after all.
† Perhaps their ToS requires the use of cookies, but, TL;DR;, it doesn’t.
I’ve installed the extension they said, now I can’t access their website 🙂