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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article.

Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?

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uBlock?

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ublock/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Safari: https://www.ublock.org/newdl/safari/0.9.5.2

Alternatively: Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" button in the address bar that extracts just the text and formats it for easy reading.

uBlock didn't fix it for me. Also, because the second overlay was huge, I couldn't close it down so I closed the tab instead...

Maybe it's time to NoScript?

I get the feeling having NoScript can be more annoying that not having it so I have been procrastinating installing it...

Speaking as someone who has NoScript installed... you are sadly correct.

I use "medium mode" in uBlock[1], which causes only 3rd-party scripts/frames to be blocked, not 1st-party ones. I could read the article fine, I had no idea there were issues with overlays with it, and it otherwise rendered fine.

Not blocking 1st-party scripts remove a lot of the tediousness of blocking scripts by default.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

There's also ublock matrix which is noscript but easier to work with.

Thanks for the suggestion, it looks very interesting. And, obviously, thanks for all the work on uBlock Origin, interneting got much less annoying after installing it in every machine I get my hands on. Thanks!

Why? Just don't read articles from such annoying sites.

Right click, Inspect Element, Delete. most of those seem to be about 20 divs deep, but usually have a parent div labelled "modal_something", so move up the chain and delete that parent.

It is annoying to have to do that, so I only do it if I truly care about reading the page. But once it is in your browser, it is in your control. Use that control.

I do it a lot for Stylebot but only a really small minority of websites deserve that waste of time. It's a good tip, one I tell everyone I know about, most sites I read on a daily basis are highly tweaked by the Inspect Element tool plus Stylebot.

I always use Firefox's Reader View when reading text-based articles. Especially on mobile. It makes the pages all the same, distraction-free, and fast to scroll.

In Chrome the 'Clearly' extension works similarly. Not on mobile sadly.

In Safari, simply switch to the Reader view, even when the popups are up. It gave me the text in a clean format without any distractions.

Firefox and Safari has a build in reader-view. In either browser they show up in the URL bar, on safar it's a few horizontal lines, in Firefox it's a little open book.

It'll strip all menus, ads and other cruft leaving you just the text, headlines and pictures nicely formatted.

I read it in "reader view" in FF, that done the trick.

Telerik Fiddler2. I use the autoresponder to block patterns.

Adblock Plus + Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus

I use BehindTheOverlay on Chrome.

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