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Opera for Android adds support for blocking EU cookie popups

Feature added to Opera's built-in ad blocker, but only available for Android users --for now.

Written by Catalin Cimpanu, Contributor Nov. 6, 2018 at 12:48 p.m. PT

Opera for Android v48, released today, has added support for blocking annoying cookie popups that have been pestering web users for the past few years.

Windows 10

This makes Opera the first and only browser --for now-- to block these types of popups, even if the feature is only live for Android users.

The new feature is not turned off by default. To enable it, users must visit the browser's Settings >> Ad blocking section and enable the "Block cookie dialogs" option.

Cookie setting confirmation popups have been an annoyance for web users since 2011 when an EU directive gave EU residents the right to refuse the use of cookies when visiting an online site.

Initial cookie popups were shown only for EU-based users, but as some sites got sloppy about their geofencing capabilities, the cookie popups have also slowly started to appear and annoy users all over the globe, and not just the EU space.

While desktop sites have minimized cookie confirmation dialogs to barely visible toolbars at the top or bottom of a website, these toolbars are huge banners when viewed from a mobile browser, sometimes obscuring half of the user's screen.

It's this glaring user experience (UX) problem that Opera is addressing today for some mobile users with the release of Opera for Android v48.

The cookie popup blocking feature is not expected to land in the desktop versions, at least for the time being. The list of features announced for the upcoming Opera v57 and v58 desktop versions didn't mention the cookie blocking capability.

Opera is expected to release v57 of its desktop browser in the coming weeks. Opera 57 is based on Chromium 70, and you can read more about its upcoming features in this Opera blog post from last month.

Other features included with Opera for Android 48 include better support for Android home screen shortcuts, support for saving payment card details inside the browser so they can be reused many times over, and improvements to the browser's readability settings. More on the new features, here.