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Every now and then, I come back to my Firefox having opened the "I don't care about cookies" blog, with some "news" which I don't care about one bit (no pun intended). The whole point of the extension is to not see a bunch of annoying crap on webpages, yet the extension itself (and many others) insist on doing the same thing: forcefully opening a new tab, loading their URL into my browser without my consent and with seemingly no ability to turn it off.

This is very insulting and violates all kinds of basic privacy and security measures. I hate being forced to trust these shady extensions, and try to keep them to an absolute minimum, but the modern web is literally unusable without several of them running.

What can I do about this on a technical level? Firefox itself has removed nearly every single useful "about:config" option over the years, so I doubt there is an option left for this, but I'm very curious to hear what you all do about this.

Do you just accept this behaviour and pretend as if it isn't happening?

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  • The extensions aren't "shady" or malware; you might even agree to be notified as a fine-print condition of installing the add-on. The authors just don't realize that this fund raising technique and type of product notification turns people off. Some of the developers are trying to make a living from it. :-)
    – fixer1234
    Commented Dec 2, 2019 at 19:55

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Every now and then, I come back to my Firefox having opened the "I don't care about cookies" blog, with some "news" which I don't care about one bit (no pun intended)

The same extension did the same thing to me a couple of hours ago. It looks like it was prompted by the fact that it had just updated itself.

I'm probably just going to uninstall it at this point. It doesn't give us any sort of opt out for these pop ups. I wasn't even using my mouse or keyboard at the time, Firefox just opened an extra tab out of nowhere and decided to show me this instead of what I was reading! That's the sort of behaviour one expects to see from malware.

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    Yeah, there are a few obnoxious add-ons that do that. A few have a setup icon that includes to ability to opt out of such notices. On one, I commented to the author that the notices were so excessive, I was going to have to uninstall it. They apparently hadn't been aware of the user turn-off, and actually modified the add-on to be a lot less obnoxious.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Dec 2, 2019 at 19:38
  • I'm trying to decide which is the lesser of the two evils at this point: the ridiculous "Do you accept cookies on this site?" banners or these occasional browser redirects.
    – Mr Ethernet
    Commented Dec 2, 2019 at 19:40

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