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Comment by OrderlyTiamat | Hacker News Reader

I use it to dismiss the popups, and the cookies get deleted after. So actually I do care about data harvesting, but I also care about a popup free internet.

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I use Remove Sticky bookmarklet (so not even an extension) - https://lolfi.com/posts/removesticky/

the bookmarklet in question is:

```

javascript:(function()%7B%20let%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3B%20for%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7B%20if(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed'%20%7C%7C%20getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'sticky')%7B%20elements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%20%7D%20%7D%20%7D)()

```

Bookmarklets are an under appreciated part of web browsing. Here's one to tell you if the current article you are reading is posted on HN so you can read the comments:

    javascript:(function(){window.location.href = "https://hn.algolia.com/?q=" + window.location.href;})();

Do you know a good article explaining and showing examples of Bookmarklets?

I don't but they're pretty easy to explain. Create a new bookmark. Give it a name. In the url field instead of a standard url in the form "https://website.com" you put JavaScript in the form "javascript:(function(){...})();

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet

They're bookmark buttons that execute Javascript on click. You need to put semi colons at the end of all lines since they don't preserve new lines. Bookmarklets should validate the URL if they are specific to a website or page. For larger ones, keep a source file since editing a single line of Javascript is not fun.

Just so I get it right: Adding this javascript into the URL of a bookmark, then saving the bookmark, will remove cookies popup on any page going forward?? I am missing how this works.

I use the "close tab" feature, which saves me a lot of time I'd otherwise spend reading or watching low-quality content, which I have found to correlate with cookie popups and newsletter modals.

Nah I love coverage from the Guardian for example, who have terrible pop-ups that cover entire screens, but the writing quality is high.

That link is dead for me, but the sticky remover bookmarklet seems to be here: https://lolfi.com/posts/browsingdeez/

There exist uBlock origin lists to block most of those popups from ever popping up if you want a safer approach.

A lot of sites are non-functional till you either accept or reject the cookies.

For example, video embeds rarely work because they need to know if you accept cookies before deciding which preroll ad to play.

When I see a youtube embed, the frame for which is blocked by default using umatrix, I right-click it and open it with mpv. With my configuration, mpv performs better at video playback than any browser, saving me battery life. It also lets me use keybindings I'm familiar with, easily screenshot the video with a single press of the s key, and make video clips of the video too. This also bypasses youtube's age gating, without requiring me to have an account.

The same works for vimeo, dailymotion, etc. Even if the video embed doesn't even get created in the first place because I didn't run that page's javascript (I only run javacript on a whitelist basis), I can usually watch a video that would have been embedded in it by simply directing mpv to the hosting page itself. This even works for most local news websites (which seem to be the trashiest sort of pages on the web.)

> I right-click it and open it with mpv

That's a super neat feature - where does it come from? uMatrix?

Just drag the URL into an open MPV window. VLC can do the same.

Nothing "just" about that. Right click -> open in MPV is low friction. Launching MPV, arranging your windows so that both MPV and the browser is visible at the same time and then doing a drag-and-drop is much higher friction.

Well, there are ways to do even what you're talking about, it just takes some set up: https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/d3m0fz/how_to_open_lin...

From a quick Google on how to open URLs with mpv.

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-to-mpv-p... for this (can also be configured to use other media players). My only complaint is that the extension looks for video elements (when invoked for the active page rather than on a link) and if it finds any it sends those URLs to mpv instead of the page URL. This is great when you need to run some JS to get to the URLs which yt-dlp? does not understand but mostly is just annoying because it manages to break things when mpv with just the page URL works fine.

The "element picker" feature of uBlock Origin makes it generally easy to manually remove these sort of annoyances too. It can also do things like remove floating headers that follow you when you scroll down the page, covering article text you're trying to read (such as the one that is on the OP blog post.)

I use an add-on called "nuke anything" which lets you just rightclick on anything you don't like and get rid of it. Works great for most things, but element picker works well too.

I found that "I don't care about cookies" blocks a lot more popups, especially from German websites. Maybe because the developer is based in Europe.

Which makes me wonder, if you use the multi-container and cookie autodelete extensions do you need to be concerned about this acquisition, even in the advent of Avast harvesting data?

The addon possibly accepts tracking of all kinds, not just tracking via cookies.

If you agree to the GDPR "cookie" popups you generally also agree to other data harvesting that requires consent but which you cannot clear because it is not stored locally.

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