14 DAY TRIAL // Browsing the web from a European Internet connection has become a huge pain in the neck for so many people, and it’s all because users are bombarded with cookie warnings whenever they load a new website.
Fortunately, skilled developers out there have already created extensions that help us deal with the whole thing, but if you’re using Vivaldi, the most recent update comes with such capabilities built in.
Called Cookie Crumbler, the new feature is not enabled by default, but you can give it a try by enabling it manually in the browser. You can find it under Vivaldi’s menu — Settings — Privacy — Tracker and Ad blocking — Manage Sources — Ad blocking sources.
“This will simply block the service that asks for consent, or hide the consent dialog, in the same way as it might remove a tracker or an ad,” Vivaldi explains.
“This feature is based on the regularly updated third-party block lists — EasyList Cookie List and ‘I Don’t Care About Cookies‘. While Cookie Crumbler works on most of the websites, this is not a perfect solution, as there will be a few websites that use other tactics to obtain cookie consent.”
What you need to know is that some websites might fail to work due to this feature, so if they don’t seem to load, just switch it off temporarily and refresh the page.
No Google FLoC
The latest Vivaldi version also comes with redesigned panels with new icons and without borders, as well as with a CTRL + D shortcut to instantly add a new site to bookmarks.
And of course, Vivaldi’s efforts against Google’s FLoC are getting a refresh too.
“As FLoC has privacy risks, we’ve blacklisted the FLoC component in this update onwards. This means it will not be downloaded and will be removed if it has already been downloaded. In the previous versions of Vivaldi, Google’s FLoC experiment was prevented from working by not setting the hidden settings that it needed in order to run,” the team at Vivaldi explains.
All these improvements are available on the supported desktop platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac.