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Comment by kop316 | Hacker News Reader

At work I am forced to use Internet Explorer, and by using it I found a surprisingly useful feature: I can not only clock all third party cookies, but it prompts me as to whether I want a first party to store any cookies. The prompt allow allows me to automatically blacklist a site from providing me any cookies. I really enjoy this, as if I know there is a site I will never log into, I can permanently blacklist it with one click. I tried to see if I can do the same but I did not find this feature on Firefox.

I have also noted that certain sites will be very user hostile if you do this. Reddit will load the site and actually overlay a white screen to make it appear like it never loads if you block its cookies.

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In Firefox you can just install the uMatrix extension. It not only allows you to block cookies, but also javascript, frames, and images. You can choose to block only third party elements, third party elements from known tracking/ad agencies, or even first party elements.

In Chrome, you can also use uBlock Origin, which is potentially a little easier to use if you're not an advanced user.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

For what it's worth I found uMatrix easier to use than uBlock Origin's "Advanced user" mode. Both took a few minutes to get a hang of since neither have particularly discoverable interfaces, but I find the uMatrix interface just a lot faster to use once I knew both.

I should have to install a plugin if I want to see targeted ads, not the other way around.

> Reddit will load the site and actually overlay a white screen to make it appear like it never loads if you block its cookies.

That's CRAZY. Couldn't reproduce in Edge though.

Did you already have cookies installed? I found that if I let it load a cookie then block it, it would load (but it already had a cookie on there, defeating the point). Try clearing out everything (or try on IE)

This isn't uncommon for sites that sniff adblockers too, though it varies how much of an obstacle it is. Often you can Inspect the div they are covering things up with and just delete it (or block it for good with uBlock etc.) - clever implementations won't fetch the actual content you wanted to read, so you'll only uncover an empty page, though.

That's why I use Cookie AutoDelete. It lets the page set cookies, but as soon as you navigate away or close the tab, they're gone.

replicated and confirmed on Chromium

preventing the Reddit script from executing (uMatrix) will prevent the white screen overlay, also.

Take a look at the "selfdestructing cookies" FF extension.

The problem with simply blocking cookies is that you'll break session handling at web hosts. That's probably why Reddit fails to work. And you don't need all that to avoid cookie tracking.

EDIT: Yep, looks like it's not compatible with the latest versions.

There used to be an option in Firefox: network.cookie.lifetimePolicy=1

It has been broken for a long time and was eventually removed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606655

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