How to deal with Google's and YouTube's aggressive popups (before you continue, sign in)

When you visit Google's main website for the first time, or after clearing cookies, you get a "before you continue" popup. On YouTube, another Google property, you will get a "sign in to YouTube" popup instead.

You need to click on "I agree" on Google's site or "no thanks" on YouTube to get rid of these popups and start using the sites.

Problem is: if you clear cookies regularly, you will get these prompts again. It can be quite annoying to deal with these popups each time, e.g. to inform YouTube for the hundredth time that you don't want to sign-in to the site.

You have a handful of options at your disposal to deal with this. One of the easier ones is to use a different search engine and site, without losing access to Google search results or YouTube videos.

You could use Startpage Search, as it is powered by Google's results, and for YouTube, you could use an Invidious mirror site, a desktop program like SMPlayer, or an app like NewsPipe.

If you prefer to use the original sites, you could block the popups that Google displays on its main site and on YouTube instead.

For that, you need to use a content blocker such as uBlock Origin; it should work with others as well as the syntax is used by many.

To block YouTube's "sign in to YouTube" popup

Add the following lines to the My filters tab of the uBlock Origin settings:

www.youtube.com###dialog

www.youtube.com##.opened

The first blocks the actual popup, the second a fullscreen overlay that YouTube displays once you block the popup.

YouTube won't display the popup anymore after you add these options. Note that you need to reload the pages, and that there is a downside to using these as all videos will pause a moment after they have started. You can hit the play button to start playback anew though and watch the videos like you normally do.

To block Google's "Before you continue" popup

To block Google's before you continue popup on the main Google site add the following lines to uBlock Origin's My filter tab:

www.google.com###lb
www.google.com##:root:style(overflow-y: visible !important;)

This one breaks the "more" link on Google's search results page but search functionality itself is working fine.

Now you:  Use a different method? Feel free to share it in the comments below.

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