>"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."
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Only in Germany for now