Bypass cookie permission dialogs on websites in Firefox

Since GDPR was introduced in the EU, users in Europe have been bombarded with requests to give permission to websites to store cookies to track your movement around their sites and networks. Usually, the form this permission request takes is a dialog that immediately pops up when you load the site for the first time. These dialogs are usually desceptive, not clearly providing an option to continue without providing permission, having already-ticked permission checkboxes, sending you to a separate domain where you have to untick thousands of checked permission boxes, and other dark patterns.

Giving permission to websites to track my movement across the web and open myself up to targeted, privacy intruding advertising is not an option. But if I can't find the button to close the dialog without giving consent after a few seconds, I get annoyed and decide to nuke the dialog from orbit. I do this through a very useful extension for Firefox called Nuke Anything Enhanced. I've had this installed for years, and regularly use it to remove annoying items from websites. I have been using it by right clicking somewhere on an offending website and selecting "Remove this object". In cases where I want to remove multiple objects, I instead have to first enable "Toggle Nuke when pressing [x] on the keyboard". This then lets me hover over objects and press [x] to delete them. This works pretty well for many annoying pop-overs, because I could just delete the background they add over the main page, which also deletes anything on top of it (including the pop-over).

I recently found an undocumented key combination for Nuke Anything Enhanced thanks to this review. You simply have to press Alt+Shift+X to enable "Nuke" mode, then hold Ctrl and left click objects you want to delete. Awesome! No longer do I need to open the right mouse button menu, toggle the "Nuke on [x]" mode and hammer the x key - I can just press this key combination, then Ctrl and click, and be done with it.

And what about those cookie pop-ups that also disable the scroll bar, so that even after you nuke the permission form, you can't scroll to view the full page? I made a Firefox bookmark for that. Just create a new bookmark, entering the following as the location:

javascript:(function(){document.body.style.overflow = "visible";})();

I gave the bookmark the name "Enable scrolling" and put it into the bookmark menu visible above each page, so I just have to quickly click it to make the scroll bar reappear. Score!