How to hide cookie banners and pop-ups before a screenshotConsent-O-Matic vs. I still don't care about cookies vs. uBlock Origin vs. Page Scanner

A cookie banner at the bottom of a full-page capture is a banner on every printed page, and a newsletter pop-up with its dark backdrop can cover half of what you meant to keep. There are two ways to get it out of the picture. One is to answer it: click the choices, the site records an answer, and the banner goes away the way it would if you had clicked it yourself. The other is to hide it: take it off the screen and answer nothing. The four tools below split along that line, and it decides what the site is told and how long the banner stays gone.

Four tools at a glance

✓ yes, ✗ no. An empty cell is one the product's own pages do not answer.

Answering or hiding

Answering a banner is the durable fix. The site's consent platform stores the answer, so the banner does not come back on that site until the answer expires or you clear it, and a capture taken later has no banner in it at all. The cost is that something clicked on your behalf, and what it clicked matters.

Hiding is the reversible fix. The banner is still there, unanswered, and the site behaves as if you had not decided. For a capture that is often exactly right: you want the page, not a decision about tracking.

Consent-O-Matic

Consent-O-Matic comes from the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI) at Aarhus University. You set your preferences once, at installation, and it recognizes the pop-ups of consent management platforms and "automatically fills them out based on your preferences". Where a site does not use the standard categories, it says it submits "the most privacy preserving settings". Its repository lists more than 200 supported platforms, UserCentrics, CookieBot and OneTrust among them, plus rules for particular sites. A small checkmark by its icon confirms it handled one.

The strength is that it is the only tool here that answers with your choice rather than someone else's, and the answer sticks. It is also open about its limits: "you might see pop-ups Consent-O-Matic can't handle yet", and the Let us know! button reports the site, which sends its address to a server at Aarhus University. Its pages describe consent pop-ups only, nothing about ads or chat bubbles.

Verdict: the one to install if you want banners answered, your way, everywhere you browse.

I still don't care about cookies

This is a community fork of "I don't care about cookies", started after that extension was acquired by Avast. Its store listing is direct about what it does: "In most cases, it just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups." When a site will not work without an answer, it accepts for you, "sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do". A Report a cookie warning entry in its menu sends a site it missed.

Its strength is reach: the listing says it removes cookie warnings "from almost all websites". The cost is in that second quote. On some sites it agrees to all cookies, which is the opposite of what Consent-O-Matic would do.

Verdict: the least effort, if an occasional "accept all" does not bother you.

uBlock Origin's cookie-notice lists

uBlock Origin is a content blocker, and its cookie handling is a set of filter lists in the Annoyances group of its Filter lists pane: EasyList/uBO – Cookie Notices and AdGuard/uBO – Cookie Notices, with EasyList – Chat Widgets, EasyList – Newsletter Notices, AdGuard – Popup Overlays and more beside them. All of them are off until you tick them. Those lists work mostly through cosmetic filters, which uBlock's wiki says "visually remove DOM elements" and have "no value privacy-wise". For a single visit there is the element zapper, which removes one element from the page without writing a filter.

The browser matters. uBlock Origin's own README records it as removed from the Chrome Web Store on 2026-08-31, the date Chrome's timeline set for removing the last Manifest V2 extensions from its store, and quotes Microsoft's plan to complete the same transition in Edge by the end of 2026. On Chrome today the project's answer is uBlock Origin Lite, a Manifest V3 blocker whose options offer seven Annoyances rulesets, EasyList/uBO – Cookie Notices, EasyList/uBO – Overlay Notices and EasyList – Chat Widgets among them, all off by default.

Its strength is breadth: it blocks the ads' network requests before they leave the browser, and the same lists take out chat widgets, newsletter boxes and overlays everywhere you browse.

Verdict: the one to use if you want ads and nuisances gone all the time, not only in captures.

Page Scanner's clean-up

Page Scanner is a capture tool, and its clean-up works on one capture at a time. Four switches under Clean up before capture in its settings, all on by default: Ads, Cookie and consent banners, Chat widgets and Pop-ups and overlays. What a switch catches is hidden for the length of the scan, the page is laid out again without it so no empty box is left, and after the capture everything comes back. It never clicks anything in the banner, so the site is told nothing, and the banner is still on the tab when the scan is done.

Consent banners are found by the elements that some two dozen consent platforms put on the page, OneTrust, Cookiebot, Usercentrics, Didomi and TrustArc among them, and by a fixed box about cookies or consent that has a button in it, in English, Korean, Japanese, German or Italian. Pop-ups are found by being marked as a dialog, or by covering half the window or more. As the capture opens, the editor says what was hidden ("Hid 4 ads, 2 consent banners, 2 chat widgets and 3 overlays before the capture.") with a Capture settings button beside it.

From the command line and the MCP server the same thing is an argument:

page-scanner scan --url https://example.com/ --out page.pdf --hide consent,overlays

--hide takes any of ads, consent, chat and overlays, or all or none; the MCP tool's hide takes the same list, and [] hides nothing. Left out, the extension's settings decide. The result counts what was hidden.

It has limits. The rules miss a banner no consent platform built that does not say "cookie" or "consent", a pop-up that is neither marked nor large, and anything that appears after the scan has looked. For those, Remove element in the editor marks what to take out and scans the page again without it. And what is hidden is not in the file, so for a capture kept as a record of how the page looked, turn all four off. The capture itself stays on your computer; the extension sends anonymous counts of which features are used, and a setting turns that off.

Verdict: the one to use when you want the page clean in the file and untouched on the tab, or when a script or an agent is doing the capturing.

They work together

Page Scanner captures the page as it stands, so whatever an extension in your browser has already answered or hidden is gone before the scan begins. Consent-O-Matic answering the banner and Page Scanner's clean-up catching the chat bubble is a reasonable pair.

Which should you use?

Use Consent-O-Matic if you want banners answered with your own choices, and captured pages without them as a side effect.

Use I still don't care about cookies if you want banners gone on as many sites as possible and do not mind that some of them get an "accept all".

Use uBlock Origin if you want ads, banners and overlays off every page you visit; on Chrome that is uBlock Origin Lite now.

Use Page Scanner if you want the banner out of the capture and nothing answered, or you capture from the command line or an agent where no one is there to click.

Frequently asked questions

Does hiding a banner mean I accepted cookies? Not with Page Scanner's clean-up: it clicks nothing, and the banner is still waiting for an answer on the tab. "I still don't care about cookies" does accept on sites that need an answer, as its listing says.

Why is the banner back after Page Scanner's scan? Because it was only hidden for the capture. The tab is left as it was found.

Can I keep the banner in the capture? Untick Cookie and consent banners in the settings, or pass --hide none.

Where this comes from

• Consent-O-Matic: its home page and its repository.
• I still don't care about cookies: its repository and its Firefox Add-ons listing.
• uBlock Origin: its README, the wiki's Filter lists, Does uBlock Origin block ads or just hide them? and Element zapper pages, its list of filter lists, and uBlock Origin Lite with its rulesets.
• Page Scanner: Clean up before capture, the command line's Hiding clutter first, the MCP server's scan_page and the editor's Remove element.