All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

AdBlock but more so

VSarkiss on 2005-02-24T22:36:45

Over the last few months, I've gotten so used to AdBlock for Firefox that I'm surprised when I look over someone's shoulder and see all the bouncy ad banners and junk.

Now I'm starting to wish it had even more capabilities, like "take out the rightmost column of this table" or "block everything in this div". (Sure I could write custom CSS to hide the divs with ads in them, but who wants to do that for every site?)

Is anybody working on an AnyBlock extension? :-)

Remove any object

brian_d_foy on 2005-02-24T23:12:00

I seem to remember an extension that would remove any object from a page. That object could be an image, table cell, and so on. I never got around to installing it though.

I think the intent was to remove those annoying sidebars with all the google ads and so on. I just immediately look for the "printer friendly" versions. :)

Re:Remove any object

chromatic on 2005-02-25T01:13:40

Perhaps you saw Nuke Anything.

Re:Remove any object

brian_d_foy on 2005-02-25T01:36:24

Yeah, that's it. Thanks :)

Re:Remove any object

Aristotle on 2005-02-26T14:22:07

And of course besides Nuke Anything you can use Firefox' builtin DOM Inspector to delete any part of the page or change CSS attributes or whatever else you want. It's too clumsy for constant use, but sometimes the effort is worth it, like when you want to read something as long as, say, a Paul Graham article at a readable font size without being confined to his 400px column, or when you want to roll your own printer friendly version of a page, or stuff like that.

Installed adblock yesterday

jdavidb on 2005-02-25T00:44:01

I finally succumbed and installed adblock yesterday. I've tried to be good about the ads, but I am just so annoyed by popups and anything that makes new windows and such. And with the way some advertisers have learned to cheat and get around the popup blocking, I decided I was tired of being nice.

Previously I had one policy: let the ads alone to be nice, unless they show scantily clad women. I know I'll be mocked for this, but I'm a one woman man, and I previously would use Firefox's builtin image blocking on any ad with a woman in a swimsuit or such. (Pudge, if you're reading, this wiped out about 50% of slashdot's advertising awhile back.)

So yesterday I installed adblock and the enhanced tab browsing interface extensions at once. I immediately blocked an adserver that I know has been putting up illicit popups. And then today I decided I was fed up with the geocities ads that have gotten more intrusive (and won't close since I upgraded from 1.0PR to 1.0), so I blocked those, too. Meanwhile, I set links to always open in the same tab instead of popping up new windows. I'm in heaven!

Re:Installed adblock yesterday

Dom2 on 2005-02-25T08:44:38

Whilst I don't personally care about naked women, what riles me is moving things on the screen. Animated adverts are like having a 5 year old child jumping up and down next to your monitor. So they all get blocked without hesitation.

A nice side effect is that when you've blocked a few things, the space that they took up collapses, leaving you with much more readable content per screen.

I'm exceedingly glad at how firefox extensions have taken off. I can't imagine trying to get all this functionality in another browser.

-Dom

Re:Installed adblock yesterday

VSarkiss on 2005-02-25T15:23:43

Exactly. I don't mind a bit of text or a quiet image down the side of a page -- I might even read it. But I find the animated images and flash movies incredibly distracting (and annoying).