Block annoying cookie messages on sites you visit in Firefox
If you have browsed the Internet lately, especially sites located in Europe, then you may have noticed that they tend to display a cookie notification on first visit.
The site informs users that it uses cookies which the European Union believes is the right thing to do to educate users about that fact.
I dislike those messages for several reasons.
First, there is barely any site that does not use cookies. All this does is state the obvious.
Second, since most sites use cookies to save information that you have seen the message, deleting those will make it return on your next visit. If you clear your browsing data regularly, you may see this on every visit which is quite annoying to say the least.
So what can you do about it?
The Firefox add-on Cookie Notification Preventer comes to the rescue. It is a semi-automated tool that you can use in two distinctive ways. Both options can be displayed after you right-click on an element on the website. This can be the notification bar on the website or a button that you want clicked to hide the bar automatically whenever it comes up.
The first enables you to click on certain elements automatically on a website. Most cookie notifications on the web display a hide this button or link that you can click on to hide the message. As mentioned earlier, the hiding is not permanent but will expire the moment you clear the cookie that is responsible for it.
The extension will click on the element on the page automatically whenever the message comes up again.
The second option hides elements on a website automatically. The idea is to hide the cookie notification bar on the website so that it is not displayed to you when you visit it regardless of whether you have clicked the hide button or not.
The effectiveness depends largely on how the notification bar is displayed on the website.
Tests that I conducted on a number of websites showed that hiding worked well on some but not on all. Clicking on the other hand worked well every time it was selected.
The extension adds an icon to the browser's main toolbar. A click on it displays a sidebar menu in the browser that you can use to configure various options.
Here you can enable or disable it, clear the user data, or inspect the stored data. Data in this context means the elements and websites you have used the extension on.
Please note that there is no option to remove individual data, only to clear it all and start anew. Considering that the extension is rather new, it is likely that an option to remove select data will be added by its author later on.
Conclusion
If you use Firefox and are plagued by cookie notifications regularly, you may want to give Cookie Notification Preventer a try as it can help you resolve those issues.
While you need to configure it for every site manually, it is a one-time process that works extremely well. The only situation where you may need to start anew is when the site changes its code.
“If you clear your browsing data regularly, you may see this on every visit which is quite annoying to say the least.”
Amen! The regulation and messages become counterproductive since it creates a special hassle for those who delete cookies regularly for privacy reasons. What irony!
Cookie Notification Preventer it isn’t available for Linux, but I don’t care about cookies is! :)
Is it possible to install ‘I don’t care about cookies’ in Palemoon with some trick? (It says v24 is not supported).
The latest version of ‘I don’t care about cookies’ is not compatible with versions of Firefox below 26.0 (including v24, the Firefox version which is Pale Moon’s source base). At the Pale Moon official forum there is one request for the extension to be compatible with the Firefox fork.
The message just reminds me to push the “remove Cookies for this site” button before I leave.
I just couldn’t get this to work.
I tried Prebake for Adblock – didn’t work.
Then ‘I don’t care about cookies’ 2.2.2 – worked perfectly
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/?src=api
As I understand the “new” law, a site doesn’t need to embed a popup, slider or give visitors options, all you have to do to comply is put a statement (doesn’t even need to be prominent) that one’s site uses cookies.
Depends on the country, In mine it must be something a user can click either to dismiss or to learn about turning off the cookies.
Anyway, I’m using http://liamja.co.uk/Prebake/ ablock filter and it takes care of cookie notifications very well.
Yes, those notifications are utterly annoying. For those of us who had already been using some sort of cookie-management add-ons before, they’re now even a double-edged sword and have the potential to make things worse: If you already prevent cookies on some sites, the notification just won’t go away until you… well, allow the cookies. :S
I’ve used Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus. Does Cookie Notification Preventer do the same thing in the background? With Element Hiding Helper, you have to “aim” correctly to hide the proper element (which can be tricky sometimes — on some sites I was even able to break the layout of the site despite choosing the (I thought) the right element).
I use: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/?src=api and i can see … nothing :-)
I’m trying the “I don’t care about cookies” Firefox Extension, it has a lot more votes and downloads and it seems very good so far:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/