Vivaldi's new ‘Cookie Crumbler’ will block pesky cookie banners and popups

While the cookie consent system is an excellent privacy improvement introduced by the GDPR, seeing and interacting with the banners seeking your approval on every single site you visit can be a very tiring experience.

Vivaldi is blocking cookie banners and popups from sites so you don't have to click through hundreds of cookie requests every day.  (Vivaldi)

When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulation came into effect in the European Union in 2018, website owners were forced to display a banner on their sites to ask for consent to store cookies, when a user made their first visit. While the cookie consent system is an excellent privacy improvement, seeing and interacting with the banner on every single site you visit can be a tiring experience.

Browser maker Vivaldi on Thursday announced that its new “Cookie Crumbler” feature would get rid of all the cookie dialogs and banners, so that users can browse sites without being interrupted. These interruptions and blocks that are sometimes placed before the user can access the content can easily force users to clicking allow without looking at the cookies they are agreeing to accept.

Vivaldi has added the Cookie Crumbler feature to both its Android and desktop browsers, and it is a part of the existing Ad and Tracker Blocker mechanism. This means Vivaldi will start treating those banners like ads, blocking the relevant page elements so that users can see the content they want as soon as they get to a website.

The browser will rely on these tracker lists to get rid of cookie banners.  (Vivaldi)

The browser will rely on these tracker lists to get rid of cookie banners.  (Vivaldi)

To turn on Vivaldi's Cookie Crumbler feature on Android, users can go to Vivaldi Settings > then Privacy > Enable Tracker and Ad blocking > Manage Sources > Ad blocking sources and turn on the “Remove cookie warnings” lists. The process of enabling the feature on your computer is slightly different, users must go to Vivaldi's menu > Settings > Privacy > Tracker and Ad blocking > Manage Sources > Ad blocking sources and then turn on the “Remove cookie warnings” lists.

However, as with many ad and tracker blocker extensions, blocking these banners might also break some websites, the company notes. Users will have to disable the Vivaldi Ad Blocker on these sites if they want to turn off the Cookie Crumbler. Meanwhile, the company notes that even if you block a cookie consent dialog on a site, it “may not have the same result” as rejecting all the cookies on that site. However, blocking third-party cookies inside your browser should fix this issue.