If you spend a lot of time surfing the Internet, you are probably annoyed by the strange cookie messages appearing on many web pages. These messages are the result of the EU cookie law, which states that the user of the website must be informed if their actions are tracked with Internet cookies.
In order to comply with the law and avoid paying a fine, website owners usually put an info bar on the top or bottom of the page with a short info message and a dismiss button.
There are many ways to implement this and one of them is our own cookies_eu Ruby gem. Other developers prefer putting an overlay above the whole web page until you dismiss the notification.
The Cookie Monster
Whichever method is used, from the user’s perspective, these notifications can be very annoying. That’s why I’ve decided to create a Chrome browser extension that will hide those notifications. Meet The Cookie Monster.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are many ways to implement the notification, but there is no universal way to hide them. That’s why my approach is to have a list of websites that display the notification and some info that’s required to hide them.
The extension does two things:
- It hides the notification itself as soon as possible – in most cases, you won’t even notice that there is something going on.
- It “clicks” on the dismiss button – this is done because some sites might not work completely until the dismiss button is pressed. This also means that if you turn off the extension, the notifications will stay hidden (at least for some time).
If you find a website that still shows the notification, you can report it by right-clicking anywhere on the site and selecting the Omnomnom this page option. This will send the page link to me so I can review it and add a rule that will block the notification in the future.
The extension is available on the Chrome Web Store and its source code is available on GitHub.
If you like the extension, please spare some of your time to review it on the Chrome Web Store.