Internet Is Fun 
The modern web page interrupts you roughly four times before you reach the first paragraph: a cookie wall, a notification request, something that starts playing, and a newsletter box that arrives once you have begun reading.
Almost all of it is preventable, and the fixes are permanent rather than per-page. Fifteen minutes of setup pays back indefinitely.
Kill notification prompts globally
Start here, because it removes an entire category. Every browser has a setting to stop sites asking to send notifications β in Chrome and Edge it is under Settings, Privacy and security, Site settings, Notifications; in Firefox it is under Settings, Privacy & Security, Permissions.
Set it to block, not to ask. You will never miss a prompt you wanted, because nobody has ever wanted one.
Stop video and audio autoplaying
The same site settings panel has an autoplay or sound control. Firefox blocks autoplay with sound by default and can be set to block all autoplay; Chrome and Edge let you block sound per site or across the board.
This also meaningfully reduces how much a background tab does to your battery.
Deal with cookie banners properly
Two things are worth separating here. The banner is annoying; what it is asking is not trivial.
The right answer to a consent banner is to decline anything beyond what the site needs to function β that is what the legislation behind them intended, even though the buttons are usually designed to make it tedious. Several browser extensions will apply that choice automatically on your behalf, which gets you both the speed and the outcome.
What is worth avoiding is the extension that simply hides the banner without answering it, which leaves the question unanswered and often leaves the default in place. For the background on why these exist at all, see why does every website ask about cookies.
Use a content blocker
A good blocker removes most of the remaining interruptions β the interstitials, the floating video, the newsletter overlay β and makes pages load faster because it is not fetching the scripts that produce them.
Two notes. Pick one, not four; multiple blockers conflict and break things in confusing ways. And consider allowing ads on the small independent sites you actually read, because for most of them it is the only revenue there is.
Reader mode for the worst offenders
When a page is still hostile, reader view strips it to text in one keystroke. It removes sticky headers, sidebars, related-content grids and most overlays at once. More of these in hidden browser features you are not using.
Turn off the browser’s own noise
Browsers have become products with things to promote. Worth finding and disabling: suggestions and sponsored tiles on the new tab page, shopping and price-comparison prompts, sign-in nags, and the search suggestions that send every keystroke to a server as you type.
The new tab page in particular is worth taking seriously β you see it dozens of times a day, and it defaults to being an advert.
Reduce what you are handed
The deepest fix is not defensive at all. Most of the annoyance arrives through pages you did not choose to visit, reached by following a recommendation. Reading things you deliberately subscribed to removes the problem at source rather than blocking it downstream.
That is the argument for RSS, and for not opening the feed in the first place. Neither requires any settings at all.
A sensible order to do this in
- Block notifications globally.
- Block autoplay.
- Install one content blocker.
- Add automatic cookie-consent handling set to refuse non-essential.
- Clean up the new tab page.
- Learn the reader-mode shortcut.
That is the whole list, and the first three do most of the work.
