Mozilla Firefox, in its nightly assemblies, has introduced a new feature that would automatically close pop-up dialogues requesting permission to save cookies on websites, while still adhering to the requirements for personal data protection in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These pop-up banners often distract and inconvenience users, causing them to lose focus and waste time closing them.
The new feature, which will be present in the upcoming Firefox 114 release, aims to integrate the function of automatically declining cookie saving requests, thereby eliminating the need for users to manually close pop-up banners. The function is currently available in Firefox settings, under the “Cookie Banner Reduction” section, found in the “Safety and Privacy” tab (ABOUT:Preferences#Privacy).
Users can turn on the “Reduce Cookie Banners” flag to reject requests for saving identifiers in cookies from specific websites listed in Mozilla’s GitHub RUBS-LIST. For more advanced settings, users can go to the ABOUT:Config section and access the “Cookiebanners.Service.mode” and “Cookiebanners.mode.mode.privatebrow” parameters.
These parameters offer three options, where 0 turns auto-rejection of cookies off, 1 rejects requests even from sites that ask only for consent and ignores banners, and 2 agrees to save cookies after rejecting requests from authority while consenting to ‘cookie-saving’ requests that cannot be denied. Unlike other browsers that use similar regimes, such as Brave, Firefox does not hide or block the banners, but automates the user’s actions. Two modes for processing banners are available: by simulating pressing the mouse (cookiebannerclicking.enabled), or by replacing cookies with the flag of the selected mode (cookioiners.cookieinjector.enablebled).
Firefox developers are optimistic that this feature will improve user experience and help increase user privacy and data protection efforts.