GitHub removes its annoying cookie banners:
Cookie banners are one of the most annoying parts of browsing the web, forcing you to click accept or deny on multiple sites. Microsoft-owned GitHub is starting to address this aggravation by removing cookie banners from its site this week. "At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution," explains GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. "After a brief search, we found one: just don't use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really."
GitHub, which operates independently from Microsoft, has now removed all nonessential cookies, meaning the site doesn't send any information to third-party analytics services. This is a change that's turned into a commitment, so GitHub will only ever use cookies that are required and none to track, display ads, or send information elsewhere.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @12:49PM
If only everyone else would follow suit!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday December 21 2020, @01:24PM
Let's hope they'll keep this cookie policy for longer than the Windows phones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday December 21 2020, @01:25PM (2 children)
That's commendable. Doubly so, because it's actually goodness at Microsoft.
Well, to render third party cookies uselessly ineffective on other sites, use Privacy Badger as a complement to AdBlock.
PB can block cookies selectively, while AB helps to get rid of those annoying cookie banners.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday December 21 2020, @02:33PM (1 child)
TFS says "GitHub, which operates independently from Microsoft,"
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @05:46PM
That is indeed what the marketing says.
(Score: 4, Informative) by unauthorized on Monday December 21 2020, @01:49PM (7 children)
For those annoyed by obnoxious cookie warnings that respawn whenever you clear out your cookies, you can install I don't care about cookies [i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu] either as a browser addon or as an uBlock/AdBlockPlus filter.
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday December 21 2020, @04:46PM (5 children)
Another (Safari specific?) solution I use is to default to opening pages in "Reader." Not every site supports it but all the news sites and blogs do and Reader mode ignores those cookie banners, most advertising, menus, and other cruft of the modern web.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:22PM (4 children)
Safari is a POS. Get a grown up's OS while you're at it. Have some self respect!
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday December 21 2020, @08:15PM
So would you recommend giving all my browsing history to Microsoft or Google? Perhaps letting Firefox feed every site I visit to Mindshare/GroupM is the "grown up" choice?
Yes, I'm aware there are some more fringe choices available, but Safari respects my privacy and works well for everything except googles triple E additions to the web and I don't really consider that much of a downside.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Tork on Monday December 21 2020, @08:47PM (1 child)
One place I worked at earlier this summer had to disable Chrome on loads of remote machines because its pigginess was interfering with the processes that handles screen encoding, adding latency to the UI and slowing down productivity.
Google was a fair shade better back when they were hungry, now I feel like I'm reliving the Internet Explorer days.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @10:01PM
I had google chrome open for a couple of days on my laptop because a site (starbux for life) didn't open properly on FF. After a while I noticed chrome was using 100% on both cpus. Don't know WTF it was doing but I would guess mining bitcoin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 22 2020, @01:36AM
Maybe you should learn the difference between a browser and an operating system before passing out advice like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:12PM
One more of a growing list of necessary extensions/blocklists to Make Web Great Again & Make Firefox Great Again-MWGA & MFGA.
I was unaware of this extension, thank you for posting about it!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday December 21 2020, @01:49PM (8 children)
To read this insightful comment you must first accept our cookie policy!
Your browser asks if you want to share your location data with this site.
Next, you must sign up for our newsletter! (covers screen) Also asks for a cell phone number, because EVERYONE owns a cell phone, right?
Great! now, do you want to take our customer survey? (covers screen)
Do you need help navigating this site? Do you need help? Do you need help? Do you want to talk to our live paperclip assistant? (help window jumps around until you dismiss it)
Don't forget if you want to see other forms of this content to download our FREE mobile app/malware!
Ok, here is the page: [large sizure inducing carousel graphc header is the only thing visible until you scroll down]
[scroll bar jumps around scrolling down as the page content "grows" and the content animates in]
Now there is a large auto playing video that has nothing to do with the content.
[scroll bar jumps around scrolling down more as the page content "grows" more and the content animates in]
Ok, after all this trouble, here is your precious content!:
"N/T" :P
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 21 2020, @02:37PM (5 children)
You didn't mention the popup that has no obvious means to dismiss it. Or, if there is a means, it is nonintuitive.
"This site uses cookies to enhance the user experience. Do you agree to being vaccinated with our data collection cookies?" There's a button that says "yes", and no other option? Maybe if you mouse over that window several times, you'll find some other option highlights, but not always. They call that "informed consent"? And, as you say, the popup obscures everything on the page that you might actually want to look at.
I generally just close the tab, and don't look back.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @03:55PM
[page detects your cursor moving up towards the tab] "It looks like you are trying to navigate away from our site! Don't forget to take our OTHER survey on RankWanker first and give our site five stars!"
(I've actually seen this sort of bullshit on some sites. Thank goodness CTRL-F4 and ALT-F4 are still around)
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Monday December 21 2020, @04:52PM
As Meatloaf sang it, you took the words right out of my mouth and it certainly was not while you were kissing me. What a garbage design some of them have like you say and I was going to, the forced acceptance of the cookies to see anything, like you it is the last time I visit. It is a sad state of affairs, anyone have a clue how to get rid of them stupid videos that pop out of nowhere and follow you down the page?
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday December 21 2020, @07:12PM (2 children)
Sometimes you can't close the tab. If the site does that, I go in to task manager and forcefully terminate the process. Such behavior is the definition of malicious, and it's best not to let it go any further. I haven't seen that for a while. Either the browsers got better, or even malware sites realized it was too much.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 21 2020, @08:22PM (1 child)
Ahhhh, back in the days of warez. Click a link, and suddenly you have 3000 popups, popunders, popbesides, popovers, poptarts, and the computer just bogs to a grinding halt. The only way to end it, was to unplug the machine. Since Windows and Internet Explorer keep scrupulous logs, you could go back and see an unending list of the most perverse scams, schemes, ripoffs, etc ad nauseum. Ewwwww!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday December 22 2020, @09:23AM
I had one back in the day. I was doing on-site tech support for a small company. We had a small group of ladies up front in the receptionist office. The older one was married to a pastor and would blush at the idea of an eighth of a boob being shown.
One day, the younger one practically runs up to me and says they need help up front immediately. It sounded urgent, so I quickly make my way there and find very explicit porn pop-ups on one of the computers. The older lady is frantically trying to close the windows, but more keep popping up. "Joe, I can't make them stop." I quickly confirm it's just browser pop-ups, so I give it the single finger salute which cured the problem. (Being reception, customers could have walked in at any time and it was faster than trying to kill them by task manager.) I then turn to her and ask "Where have you been surfing?" The other ladies chuckled but the older lady was a bit flummoxed. It turns out she always went to a particular website by googling it and clicking on the first link without reading what it said. Well, that day, apparently the porn site had out ranked her normal site. She learned an important lesson that day.
Other than the brief teasing remark, I didn't make a big deal out of it which she greatly appreciated. All these years later, I still laugh just thinking about it.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday December 21 2020, @07:00PM
Your browser asks if you want to share your location data with this site.
Of course I do [youtube.com]
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Touché) by nishi.b on Monday December 21 2020, @08:28PM
That reminded me of this clip : BBC One - If High Street Shopping was like Online Shopping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrwQ-guwvfs [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @03:20PM (3 children)
... fix your code to be standard compliant and remove those silly requirements on specific user agent strings (read "modern browsers").
Seriously, this is all "this website is optimized for browser X" from the 1990's all over again, but now without telling this anyone.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 21 2020, @03:42PM
User agents are provably all but worthless. Download an addon, tell it whatever you want the world to believe, and browse the web. Almost everything works. It's been a couple years since I started telling the bank that my browser is an Android browser, because the mobile page loads in a very small fraction of the time of the "normal" page.
On a very rare occasion, some page won't load in one browser or another, so I switch user agent, or switch to another browser with a different set of addons - or I just close the page.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @03:59PM (1 child)
Tried to log in to monster.com on palemoon? This exactly. Such stupidity.
(Score: 2, Funny) by epitaxial on Monday December 21 2020, @07:45PM
Lol you're visiting a 90s website with a 90s browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:26PM
you, whose business model for github doesn't need spy cookies, and which actually interferes with same, i salute thee!