The Opera web browser now officially supports an option to block stupid-cookie-rule pop ups as part of its ad blocker options. I see this as a very positive step and hope that commercial and open source browsers alike will follow suit.
The feature reportedly works on at 50,000 major sites and the list is growing.
CC-0 from Pixabay
It’s already enough to make this dedicated Chrome/Safari/Firefox user take notice. By wild ass guess my estimate is that I waste 15-20 seconds a day dismissing cookie notifications even with a popular adblocker in place to winnow them down.
That’s 2 minutes a week—more than an hour and a half a year. Across the billion internet users in Europe and North America that adds up to a significant waste of productive time protecting us from running with spoons, not scissors.
The way I see it the Internet owes me a few hundred bucks for that wasted time—or at least a better ad blocker.
Kudos to Opera for this move.