Like most things, government regulation is good, but "in moderation". A couple years ago, the European Union passed a law that required any website to warn users that it uses "cookies". Now, every website you visit for the first time pops up a big banner explaining their use of cookies. When you clear your cache (sometimes happens automatically after a while), or use a different browser, or different device, you see this banner popup again!
The internet always had many annoying popups trying to sell you stuff, get you to sign up for a newsletter, click to see some offer or gimmick, or to show you some message or notification. But now with these cookies, it's just unbearable. I've tried a couple extensions to block cookie notifications, but they didn't work 100%. For some sites, they broke. I could disable them for those sites, but that was kind of a lot of work for just cookie banners.
So, I decided to make my own extension - to remove all popup banners from all sites. Not just cookies, but all popups. Anything that floats over the top of site content is evil! It must be stopped! It's bad practice which leads to poor user experience. Some sites don't know any better. Some rely on a quick gimmick or click or impulsive signup or purchase. Whatever. I don't care. I just want it out of my face.
It's available now for Chrome. Coming soon to Safari. For Firefox, you can get it and any other Chrome extension, by first installing "chrome extensions for firefox".
Disclaimer: I am the developer of FlySwatter.Dev, though I don't benefit financially from it. I made it for my personal web browsing, and love it. It is open source and free. It is still experimental, and in active development. If you try it and it doesn't work well for certain sites, just disable it on those sites - clicking the FlySwatter icon, then click "disable on this site". It stores what sites you enable/disable it on, and sends back this data to the server. This data is collected anonymously. You don't have to login. It does not know who you are. This reporting is only to improve the service for the future. If you click "disable on this site", I will see it at the end of the month, mixed into a list of all sites disabled by users. I'll try to fix it for that site. If you're a programmer, you can help! Help write code to support more sites.