Firefox is rolling-out Cookie Banner Blocker by default in private windows | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is rolling-out Cookie Banner Blocker by default in private windows

mozilla.org

50 pointskomape20 comments

>"Firefox is rolling-out Cookie Banner Blocker by default in private windows for users in Germany during the coming weeks. Firefox will now auto-refuse cookies and dismiss annoying cookie banners for supported sites."

Only in Germany for now

I can understand region-locks for products that need to comply with region-specific regulations but for things like these it makes me scratch my head. What's the rationale? Is Mozilla worried goverments elsewhere might not like this? It seems so weird to me.

Since this is based on a set of somewhat site-specific rules, perhaps they just have good coverage of websites typically visited by users in Germany so it's a good way to ship it to some users without disappointing others with a half-working feature?

There was a recent court decision in Germany, ruling that websites must respect the Do Not Track header.

Have to admit this is quite nice. Firefox may be funded partially by the soulless Google, but Firefox continues to impress me with its features. Great job, Firefox team!

Other browsers like Brave have this feature for a while. It's another example of Firefox getting late to the party.

I mean there wasn't really much need for it when the functionality has been available for ages in various extensions. Not least of which uBlock origin, which may as well be considered a must have for now.

Brave and firefox clearly differ on which features to add natively and which to allow extensions to fill in, but saying this makes firefox late to the party is just silly. You might as well point out that firefox has no ad blocking, even though uBlock origin recommends using firefox at this point.

Yes, Firefox should block ads by default.

It doesn't need to. It's only chromium that risks limiting extendability so much that ad blocking becomes impossible without changing core functionality of the browser.

Why does it not need to? It does block pop-ups after all, which came as a response to pop-up spam in the early days of the internet, and as a user-agent, browsers correctly decided to block this behavior for the benefit of their users.

Adblocking isn't a solved problem. Current state of the art borks a minority of websites. The user must diagnose that the problem is caused by adblock and either abandon their intended browsing or manually disable adblock.

Plenty of ordinary users don't mind ads. They'd be frustrated to be told there's now a "don't break the website" switch.

Adblocking requires very frequent updates. It's a cat-and-mouse game. Even if Firefox just installed UBO by default plenty of users would now start filing bugs on Firefox's tracker.

Part of the difference is that every browser blocks popups, so sites are incentiviced to fix the resulting breakage. But on sites run by people who don't care about usability (like some governments and banks) you'll still see messages informing you to allow popups.

A user-agent should give users agency, it doesn't have to make all decisions for them. It wouldn't necessarily be bad of firefox to block more ads, but I'm perfectly happy with it blocking only the clearly malicious content like pop-ups, trackers, fingerprinters, crypto-miners and leaving the rest for users to decide themselves.

Any idea how that would work? I mean it's not as if these things are standardised in any way.

It follows a list of global (heuristic?) and website-specific rules, which may specify what buttons to click in order to make the banners disappear, or what cookies to pre-load in order to simulate the user already having set a preference, preventing the banners from showing up.

Meta bug tracking all developments: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1783015

As it stands, the internet is one big, long, violative traffic stop. We need to fix it and find another way to extract engagement and business "insights" that don't use people as data and meat shields

Edit: I view the internet more as a digital highway (like the insanely large US ones that extend all across the country) than a series of tubes

This is so appreciated. Reminds me when they were popular bc they had popup blockers (before Chrome era)

Also… I feel old. I guess I am

Has anybody figured out how to enable this permanently and not just in private windows?

Try with these instructions: https://community.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/firefox-cookie-ba...

> We’ll always hit “Reject all” if we have that option though in absence of a “Reject all” we’ll do what you’d do otherwise and hit “Accept all”

Huh, often if Reject All isn't available there is a customize option that's basically the same thing. That's very different from Accept All.

You can set the pref to 1 instead so there is no accept all: https://github.com/mozilla/cookie-banner-rules-list

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