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Orion ad blocker is great but can you please remove all cookie consent popups.

How does the Cookie pop-up blocker work?

The Cookie pop-up blocker employs CSS rules and network request blocking to hide pop-up elements as well as block specific network requests. If these two methods fail, the feature automatically chooses “accept.”

The turnout of these steps depends on how the website has implemented its consent cookies. For example, some websites apply cookies to their users by default until they click “reject.” Other websites, like Google, run this element until you click “accept.”

The Cookie Pop-up Blocker simply ensures that you don’t see any pop-ups.

Other browsers are already doing this

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/29/22408098/vivaldi-cookie-crumbler-blocks-pop-ups-floc-gdpr

    There are a number of cookie consent blockers, but something I have occasionally noticed is that they end up breaking the underlying site.

    There are clearly lists which do work, but they likely need to be updated fairly often (like ad blockers). The failure mode though will "break" websites for users, and in my experience some of the failure modes are a bit non-obvious. For example, scrolling on the page being broken, as the site assumes there's a model pop-up asking for consent, and therefore isn't allowing you to scroll - the modal has been blocked, but the JS functionality killing scrolling hasn't!

      ad guard does this and a various of other safari extensions. I agree it would be good to remove these cookie popups

        It is not sure how we can do this in a way that also ensure user privacy. If most of these work by clicking "accept" without knowing what they are accepting (and it could be more than cookies) we are potentially putting our users in a position they do not want to be. It is not a risk I am ready to take.

        Currently installing an extension like uBlock Origin will allow the user to run lists like those. Perhaps implementing a feature in Orion for users to add they own block lists may be an option too.

          a month later

          I think most cookie blockers work not by accepting everything, but removing the popup/banner out of the way - but like @gp says, this is sometimes tricky. I maintain one such blocker of my own for Safari, but this is something definitely non-trivial and something that needs to be sometimes updated and not a one-off. There are different kinds of banners, some can be harmlessly hidden, sometimes you'd also need to re-enable scrolling, or remove blur, or other things like that, and sometimes there's nothing you can do. And sometimes it happens that a site changes something at some point - e.g. hiding a div was earlier enough but now it also started blocking scrolling, or added an overlay below that wasn't there before, and the site ends up in a broken state.

          Not to mention that there are literally thousands of different class/id names used, with a large "long tail"… so you'd need some kind of machine learning to detect the banners probably 😉

          So I'd say this sadly isn't something that can be handled in a general way on the browser side without maintaining a blocklist or referring to someone else's - at least until maybe one day someone comes up with some general protocol that can be used for this and all sites implement it…

          • Vlad replied to this.

            It might be viable to do this for the top 10 consent management platforms (CMPs) plus the top 25 websites or something, but the long-tail is complex and evolving. In saying that though, the top CMPs will cover the most egregious culprits that have the most annoying processes to find the "go away and stop asking me" option.

            Most blockers will simply implement a div and maybe script blocker.

            If there was a way to build "custom" Orion blocklists that are updated from a fetched URL, this could become a "community thing" - I think there's some attempts to do this in uBlock Origin, and in other standalone blockers.

              mackuba as someone with experience in this matter, what could be approach that will give users 80% of features with 20% effort (MVP)

                  3 months later

                  I have found this extension does a particularly good job of removing cookie consent banners - https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu. The best part is, "When it's needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do)".

                  It doesn't work with Orion yet though. Hopefully it will be supported soon.

                  • phy replied to this.
                    10 months later

                    oportunitytortoise Unfortunately, there is a migration away from that extention as Avast bought it... One problem with extensions is the privacy/security hole that opens up when the dev sells to a more nefarious outlet. Good reason to argue for rich core features in Orion in areas where this is the most egregious.

                    There is also:

                    I'd love to see a decent implementation of this in Orion, but I'd say it is non-trivial and would need some research/careful thought.

                    • Vlad replied to this.

                        phy Let us know which extension works the best and we will consider implementing it natively.

                            10 days later

                            Consent-O-Matic does work but for some reason it reloads/refreshes Google and/or Youtube a couple of times before it kicks in

                            Consent Popup Blocker somehow blocks the consent popus without the reloads

                            Also, Version 0.99.123.1-beta (WebKit 615.1.16.1) seems to crash when I enable one or the other. I can't remember previous versions of Orion doing that. Will investigate...

                              10 days later

                              Vlad I don't care about cookies - Chrome Web Store was the best one I have used but I (and others) abandonned it because I dont like that the dev sold it to Avast.

                              Consent-O-Matic is good but a bit slow with page flopping as it steps through screens. I am trying Super Agent - Automatic cookie consent - Chrome Web Store atm but it doesn't seem to dismiss Google's annoying consent form if you are flushing their cookies.

                              EDIT: I just found I still don't care about cookies - Chrome Web Store, which is "Community version of the extension I don't care about cookies (no Avast)". So far it is working great; just like the original and blicks Googles consent popup that most others don't (although I'm windering if this might be a problem with Orion).

                                  a month later

                                  Why can't Orion have an option to enable something like the Fanboy's annoyances list? It's a uBlock list that helps manage cookie consent popups. Just have it as a toggle by content blocking that says "supress cookie consent popups"

                                  4 months later

                                  joystmp We will allow for custom block list as a part of antoher feature suggestion. For now we have included consent-o-matic into popular extensions (which from what I understand is a much more powerful version of a cookie blocklist)