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Comment by kjaftaedi | Hacker News Reader

Interesting they want to phase out cookies given how hostile they are to people that browse without them.

If you go to youtube without cookies, your video starts playing. Then it stops and you get a popup asking if you want to sign in. You click no, then it rewinds your video.. then you have to click play and re-watch the part you already watched.

Every video.

Even google as a search engine becomes a less attractive option when you have to agree to their 50 page long privacy policy every time you search for something.

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Why not use Cookie AutoDelete?

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...

That's what's doing it: you'll effectively get to Youtube without a cookie and be harassed.

It's a strange thing. It's so annoying that I've essentially given up Youtube. I don't care enough about the videos that I want to Login and whitelist (and have a profile recorded) the site, and this makes the experience bad. Ergo YT is fading from my life. Can't say that I miss it all that much after a few days, it has been a habit more so than something I actively enjoy.

Okay, I thought "without cookies" was referring to having cookies disabled.

I use Cookie AutoDelete and YouTube doesn't give me any problems for discarding its cookies. But maybe one of the uBlock Origin annoyance filter lists I use is taking care of the nag screen.

I’m making a dedicated Google account/browser profile for YT this week as I prepare to delete my main, ten+ year old Google account. It’s the last/only thing I actually need Google cookies for (outside of work/gsuite which is a different machine entirely).

I use Cookie AutoDelete (I use only Firefox, but that is irrelevant in this context.) Deleting all cookies (one could also use white^Hallow lists) works 98% fine. The problem is local storage. Pages can store the same (and more) information as in cookies in local storage. There is no add-on API to manipulate local storage. At the moment only an estimated 2% of all web sites use local storage to store tracking information. But if cookies get widely ignored/deleted, I am sure that will change.

I share your concern, but CAD has claimed to be able to wipe localStorage, IndexedDB and Service Workers for some time (a few months?). Check the settings screen of CAD and see for yourself.

Cookie autodelete can also delete LocalStorage, at least on firefox.

https://imgur.com/cPDJW3v.png

I stand corrected, there is some support.

It is not container-aware and no allow lists are possible. Everything gets deleted. Probably because of these limitations it's off by default.

I seemed to have remembered some older arguments in this discussion:

https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issue...

everything gets deleted when you first enable it, its still site specific afterwards

https://imgur.com/vmnozjV.png

How and where? I block cookies with uMatrix and I've never seen it. Just checked - Chromium, allow all but cookies.

That said I usually browse youtube with minimal setup

    * * * block
    * * frame block
    * 1st-party css allow
    * 1st-party frame allow
    * 1st-party image allow
    youtube.com 1st-party script allow
    youtube.com 1st-party xhr allow
    youtube.com googlevideo.com xhr allow
    youtube.com ytimg.com image allow

I'm deleting cookies whenever I quit Firefox (which is ~once per day, as I'm using Nightly). I don't really have these problems.

I use firefox with cookies being cleared on every session and I get exactly the same behaviour described by the parent post. You may want to check whether your cookies are actually cleared.

Weird. I use it in Safari in private mode and have never experienced these issues. Looking at my cookies, I have no google or YouTube cookies on my machine.

It’s only 3rd-party cookies, right?

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