When I open that page, it nearly mmediately display an overlay on the article asking me to accept cookies. I wonder whether that might be related to the problem. Do you use any add-ons or features related to stripping or hiding cookie banners?

When I open that page, it nearly mmediately display an overlay on the article asking me to accept cookies. I wonder whether that might be related to the problem. Do you use any add-ons or features related to stripping or hiding cookie banners?

Thanks for the reply! I do not use an add-on related to hiding cookie banners. As a matter of fact, I see the cookie banners all the time for other sites. In any case, I have wondered if it might be related to resetting cookies from that site (only). However, the way that I've usually done this is to open a tab on the site and click the "lock" icon on the address bar. In this case the tab does not stay open long enough for me to do that.

Incidentally, I have also just tried the same thing on my other Mac laptop, it gives the same behavior and is running the same version of Firefox.

Update: refreshing the cookies didn't work, I found a way to do it in the settings instead of on the tab itself. I probably tried that before, it's been over a year since I started having this problem.

Another way to clear the cookies is here:

Settings page > Privacy & Security panel > Cookies and Site Data section

Click the Manage Data... button and you can remove just the cookies for sciencedirect.com without affecting other sites.

Does that allow opening the page?

I think our posts crossed.

Could you test in a clean profile? Here's how:

Inside Firefox, type or paste about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it.

Take a quick glance at the page and make a mental note of which Profile has this notation: This is the profile in use and it cannot be deleted. That is your current default profile.

Click the "Create a New Profile" button, then click Next. Assign a name like Test2025, ignore the option to relocate the profile folder, and click the Finish button.

Firefox will switch your default profile to the new one, so click the Set as Default Profile button for your regular one to avoid an unwanted surprise at your next startup.

Scroll down to Test2025 and click its Launch profile in new browser button.

Firefox should open a new window that looks like a brand new, uncustomized installation. (Your existing Firefox window(s) should not be affected.) Please ignore any tabs enticing you to connect to a Sync account or to activate extensions found on your system to get a clean test.

Do the problem site(s) work any better in the new profile?

When you are done with the experiment, you can close the extra window without affecting your regular Firefox profile. (Test2025 will remain available for future testing.)

That worked, with the new profile. Note: when I opened the page it sort of blurred out for a second but it didn't ask me about cookies.

Hmm, interesting. In either profile, could you take a look at the preferences which turn on/off the cookie banner dismisser:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste cookiebanners.service.mode and pause while the list is filtered. Firefox should display two preferences:

• cookiebanners.service.mode
• cookiebanners.service.mode.privateBrowsing

(3) By default, these have a value of zero. If either of them has a value other than zero, you can restore the default value using either:

• At the right end of the row, look for a left-arching arrow reset button and click that, or
• Double-click the preference to display an editing field, and change the value to 0 then press Enter or click the blue check mark button to save the change

For reference, the valid values for the service modes are:

• 0 => Don't do anything
• 1 => Try to reject all cookies
• 2 => Try to reject all cookies, but if that is not possible, try to accept all cookies

Note: if the preference appears to be locked to some value other than zero, that could be caused by an Autoconfig file. We'll have to help you track that down.

Ok, sorry for coming back to this after several months, but it is still not allowing me to configure my default profile to visit the Elseiver sites like I need to. The procedure above revealed that both of the following are 0, as expected.

   cookiebanners.service.mode
   cookiebanners.service.mode.privateBrowsing

In your regular profile, could you test in a private window? Private windows have these major differences from regular windows:

• Cookies set in regular windows are ignored
• Cached files saved from pages in regular windows are ignored
• Some extensions might not be running if they do not have permission to run in private windows (Extensions in Private Browsing)

Does the Elsevier site work any differently in a private window in your regular profile?

Ok, in the private window both of the attributes are still zero. However, the Elsevier site does load in the private window, and I can download the .pdf of papers as normal.

Could the problem be a non-obvious extension? On the Add-ons page (Command+Shift+A), Extensions list, the ones without the purple mask icon are the ones that run only in regular (non-private) windows.

Ok, I did that. When I turn off the "Papers by Readcube" extension, the Elsevier site works as expected.

https://www.papersapp.com/

This is a bit disappointing b/c I use that extension a lot. I wonder if there's a way I can retain it?

The Papers by Readcube extension allows turning off automatic operation on websites. Typically in that case, you would need to click a button or use a right-click context menu item to inject its links/buttons into a page. I can't test myself since I don't have an account. To test:

To change the permission, open the Add-ons page, click the extension name to show the details panel, then click the Permissions heading. In the Optional Permissions section, turn off "Access your data for all websites." Can you find a way to use the extension on sites that it doesn't disrupt?

That works to allow access to the Elsevier content, but the extension signs me out and doesn't seem to remember my login. That makes it so that it is awkward to get the readcube extension working even on sites it previously worked on.