[proofofconcept]

As I remember it, this was an option you could enable in Netscape Navigator back in the dialup days. In practice it meant that every time you went to a new website you'd have to click ok on a dozen popup menus asking for permission to store each individual cookie before the page would load. I'm sure there are ways to make that process go a little more smoothly but in practice it's still probably something that most users would immediately turn right off.

[weinzierl]

If I remember correctly the UI for this existed long after Netscape Navigator. According to [1] it was removed in Firefox 44 in early 2016. I had expected that they only removed the UI but left the functionality available via about:config but that doesn't seem to be the case.

EDIT: According to [2] and [3] it seems the behavior was triggered by about:config network.cookie.lifetimePolicy set to 1 (ASK_BEFORE_ACCEPT), but the meaning of 1 apparently has changed over the years. At least setting it to 1 doesn't trigger any cookie dialogs in my Firefox 70.0.1 (64-bit).

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2016/02/05/firefox-44ask-me-everytime...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233339

[3] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.cookie.lifetimePolicy

[cheez]

Oh my god, you just triggered some horrifying memories of that popup.

No, you definitely don't want the web browser to ask.

[kbrosnan]

In the dial-up days I remember turning on ask to set cookies. It was fairly common to need to deny 10-20 cookie requests even back then. Now there are extensions to manage website trackers that deal with more than just cookies. Extensions are a ton better than having the user agree to each cookie that is sent.

[cheez]

Yep.

[jwagenet]

You don’t want the browser to ask because the large number of cookies is so normal.

[cheez]

It was brutal even back then.