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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

>> partly due to janky JS and bloat

Are there any effective browser extensions to intelligently prevent things like a "Subscribe to our newsletter" popover?

I'm trying to think how i could tell uBlock origin to intercept any element with a high z-index which has it's ".display" attribute changed only in response to a timer or a scroll event.

In firefox i have the "I don't care about cookies" plugin and i genuinely forget that noise exists on the web until i use another browser and it all comes flooding back. I'm hoping there's something similar for this endemic cruft the web has been filled with.

Reader mode can be useful. NoScript can be useful but can also be painful.

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My solution is to close the browser tab whenever a popover appears. I always have plenty of other open tabs to read.

same here. I don't even get mad anymore, just instantly close the page. This includes the cookie popup as well on mobile.

Yeah.

I used to dive into the console and start removing stuff and even went so far as to write a bookmarklet that tries to identify and nuke anything with fixed position and reset the height to auto on body/html but ... if someone's going to be that user hostile it's not worth my time.

When this happens I'll copy the url, close the tab and paste it into archive.is.

I tried this method, but i'm finding it impossible to book movie tickets when I keep closing the window on their homepage.

From the same author as "I don't care about cookies":

https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/

I haven't personally tried it yet, but I'm tempted.

Edit: it's a subscription. No, thanks. I much prefer the crowdsourcing model, which allows the entire world to have it (and contribute to it), and not only those who can pay such prices (that are quite expensive in most of the world, including where I live).

The problem I would think is the overlap for this of users who want jank removed from web pages and those who would choose to pay for it if optional is small.

It may be small in proportion, but large enough so that a Kickstarter could raise enough money to create and free the code as opensource.

Another subscription service and software you can't actually buy is much worse than the annoyance of pop overs. Does it atleast keep working without updates after a year?

I'm using uBlock Origin, don't get any of that. Be sure to enable all the "annoyance" filter lists in the settings.

I think it's about the websites you visit. If you only use "tech-y" or smaller niche websites you don't come across them. But if you visit websites like from the big news media or even niche websites that are not in English. There are filters for all major languages but there are certainly fewer skilled filter writers with time and willingness to write them in other languages.

There's also a gap of websites that are big enough to have this corporativist behavior of putting annoying... objects in their webpages, but not big enough that enough people visit to the point where it's likely that one of them will write the script.

Especially because, like, I do write some stuff for userstyles and userscripts sometimes, but I won't publish them unless I think they'll be useful for at least a small group of people, which I never seem to think will happen for websites in my mother tongue for some reason.

uBlock origin and uMatix combined:

- Globally blacklist malicious JS (and other features) within uMatrix.

- uBlock Origin's "Annoyances" filter is highly effective.

- UBO's element remover tool is also quite good, and permanently removes misfeatures.

For added leverage, on desktop, I use Stylish to write custom CSS rules that assign annoyances the CSS property "display: none !important". This is typically on a site-by-site basis, though there may be some common targets that can be addressed either globally or with a standard stylesheet applied to multiple sites.

All of which is a pain, agreed, but less of one than not doing so.

uBlock reminds me every day why I like HN so much with its big fat “0” on my browser border

https://scribe.rip extracts medium text without javascript

It's a little more manual but I like having Behind the Overlay installed. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-overlay...

It's a one click removal. It's nice because I dont have to search for the nearly transparent x or tiny no thanks, I can just muscle memory to the same button in the toolbar of my browser every time.

Not for mobile...

I know that such prompts are not technically pop up windows, but they are in spirit. I really wish the major search engines would penalize sites that use them, or that we would get browsers that started blocking them.

Yeah, the best solution is NoScript. It's not too painful as you tune your whitelist. It sucks, but it's better than the frigging popups. Even works well in Firefox for Android, which is a game changer.

Yes. I use tamper monkey to write scripts for sites I visit frequently that have annoying popups, content blocks (like chat) and link-jacking (streaming sports sites).

When NoScript becomes a pain it's time to close that tab.

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