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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

There is another widget which shows a bottom toolbar that looks like the Facebook one (and it offers sharing and chats and other crap). It makes the website fucki*gly slow and sometimes interferes with the website JavaScript and add nuisance like bad scrolling, selecting...

I finished up closing these sites as I open them. I would also recommend that everyone that has a blog, implement the most minimalistic widgets, less JavaScript and a simple design. The purpose of a blog is to read, if I want to chat, I'll open Skype.

Coding Horror is a good example.

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AdBlock does a good job on these. I have meebo.com and wibiya.com completely blocked, as well as facebook.com, fbcdn.net, tynt.com, etc. I use a different browser installation altogether for things like Facebook when I actually want to download their stuff.

Basically, any time a website takes ages to come up, I turn on Firebug's Net panel and monitor the laggy requests; and then, if warranted, kill them off with AdBlock. Similarly for offensive widgets.

Have you considered using NoScript? It might be easier to whitelist the few widgets you care about, vs. tracking down miscreants.

With the relentless XSS attacks against large websites, including the Paypal XSS the other day, and the recent Twitter XSS attacks, why are there any techies left not using NoScript?

The web is not safe to use without NoScript.

I uninstalled NoScript after it interfered with my e-commerce transactions one too many times. Lack of Javascript caused the transaction to halt abruptly, sometimes causing me to lose the ticket I was booking (some travel tickets are very time sensitive here). Even after I added my own bank to the whitelist, the middleman sites between the retailer and the bank were getting affected and blocked.

I just installed RequestPolicy addon after going through this thread, and am hoping it will be a good tradeoff (other reason for installing this instead of NoScript are those annoying ad-filled pages NoScript shows after its frequent updates, and its author's attempts to fiddle with ABP sometime back, making his integrity questionable).

I uninstalled it myself for the same reasons. It does cause problems some times, but after you've fine tuned it those times become very infrequent. You can even synchronise your settings between Firefox installations now by telling NoScript to store its config in a bookmark.

I reinstalled NoScript a while back. IMO, the problems it prevents outweigh the problems it causes.

Techies using Google Chrome perhaps? (not me!)

I don't use Chrome, but I do use some non-Firefox browsers (Arora, w3m, sometimes uzbl), so I take a more barbaric approach: a giant /etc/hosts file pointing various offensive domains at 255.255.255.255, and iftop/firebug/Webkit's inspector/suspicious cookies to determine where horrors are coming from.

I tried once, but the whitelisting got too tedious; almost every website I interact with needs scripting. I've also never been hit with an XSS attack; similarly I haven't gotten a virus since a boot sector on a floppy 15 years ago. I haven't found the risks to be high.

I have my NoScript set to allow %site.com and *.%site.com by default. It leaves most sites usable, but blocks most of the bs. I only have to white list somethinsomethingCDN.com rarely. (less than five sites) That and googleapis, jquery, not much else. Read the docs and adjust the settings accordingly.

Is it the Meebo bar?

http://bar.meebo.com/

Yeah, that one!

The bar from www.wibiya.com is even worse. Not only is it slow to load but it has notification pop ups and a bunch of other crap.

I'm sick and tired of all the sites that have decided to add bars to the top and bottom of their pages and a billion social network buttons all over the page. I'm at the point where even though I'm blocking most of them via adblock new ones keep showing up so I just give up and stop going back to sites that use them.

Meebo is very proud of this bar, for reasons I don't entirely understand. I can see a fair amount of use for it, on some websites, but I really wish they would optimize it so that those that opt to implement it on their pages don't get such a performance hit to pageload.

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