I think there's no difference between never saving cookies and blocking all cookies. Most browsers have the option to block all cookies (just checked Safari and it's in the Privacy tab in settings).

It's more complicated than just that: the sites are designed that they just don't work if the browsers don't show them the cookies they saved before. And there's the whole story about the "third party cookies" and on today's pages there is often much more "third party" content than anything else and there are often dependencies on third parties to even see the content.

So to be able to somehow reduce the exposure, while avoiding every time clicking for a long time to accept and reject all the conditions from some big sources like Google (where in Google case is anyway not possible to affect much in spite of what one clicks, as the EU sees), one way would be to construct the compartments, i.e. keep a few "related" sites inside of something that the sites see as a unique browser. Then one has to maintain as easy as possible all that, to appear to the sites as "unique browsers", while using one.

Firefox has the "containers" for that but the use of them is, as far as I've tried, a bit clumsy -- it's still quite hard to manage what happens in which container -- there's too much manual work to do and it's easy to make errors, even if the user has the general idea of how he'd like to compartmentalize his surfing.

Chrome, of course, is less interested to enable their users to hide something from Google.

And Firefox is also not guaranteed to ultimately do exactly what the user would like the most, especially as the users for years flocked to Chrome, directly showing that they "don't care" giving Google what Google wants, as long as it's more "convenient." The structure of Mozilla entities is also somehow made to induce some decision problems which became more prominent with the time.

It doesn't seem that the "free market" can solve this, and EU intervening long-term could work, if they manage to be consistent enough and manage to enforce that. But it takes a lot of time.

>Is there a browser that pretends to accepts all cookies but never saves them?

I use the Temporary Containers extension in Firefox, and I think that comes pretty close. Every tab can hive its own cookies, separate from all other tabs, which disappear when the tab is closed.

I've got mine setup to delete cookies for a domain when the last tab for that domain is closed. I also run Ublock Origin, don't accept third party cookies, and have javascript turned off for all domains by default.

The law isn't really just about cookies. You could use local storage, indexed DB, WebSQL (RIP) whatever the law would still apply. Disabling browser storage will break everything single website on the internet that has a session mechanism. The alternative is to append a session ID to every single link on a page. consumer router admin pages often do that instead of using cookies.

Accept them for the session only (I guess all browsers have this option). As a bonus, this won't break every site (because yes, cookies are an important part of the web).

Firefox has some extensions for fine grained rules on cookies. After you get annoyed by things breaking because cookies don't live for long enough, you can install one and set a different lifetime for the ones you want.

I use Cookie AutoDelete, which automatically deletes cookies after you close the tabs.

Combined with blocking all third party cookies, this seems to be pretty good.

Obviously, the issue is now that Google now prompts you almost every time you visit.

I think you can configure Firefox to disable all cookies, with the catch, though, written out, that "might break certain sites". Soooo, shrugs

I just use self-destructing virtual machines in Qubes OS.