StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser | Hacker News Reader

StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

underpassapp.com

127 pointssogen50 comments

I’ve tried a lot of ad blockers over the years. Browsing mainstream news on the internet, in particular, highlights the absolute cesspool of pop ups and auto-playing videos that characterize the contemporary web.

None, least of all Stop the Madness, have worked as well and on as many devices as this simple bookmarklet, whose author I don’t know but who has saved me countless aggravations

    javascript:(function%20()%20%7B%20var%20i,%20elements%20=%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*');%20%20for%20(i%20=%200;%20i%20%3C%20elements.length;%20i++)%20%7B%20if%20(%5B%22sticky%22,%20%22fixed%22%5D.includes(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position))%20%7B%20elements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D);%20%7D%20%7D%20%7D)();

Edit: credit to the original author [1] and thank you!

1. https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

javascript:( function(){ let i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if(getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'sticky') { elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]); } } document.body.style.overflow = "auto"; document.body.style.position = "static"; })()

here's the script for people that want to see the stuff without all the url encodings. oh and I added a thing that stops them from stopping your scrolling(think the kind that pop up an ad or something and stop you from scrolling)

one of the most useful bookmarklettes that I use many times a day. I got it from the original author too I think

This is great. I just discovered that in firefox you can have bookmarks without a title. So if you put this as the only item and without a title into the "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder, you have a simple button that you can add to your toolbar. This is hacky, but good enough for me.

Love it!

I’ve had the Kill Sticky bookmarklet handy as the first item in the bookmarks bar of every browser I’ve used for years and it is phenomenal in how simple and useful it is. Works everywhere from my iPad to my desktop and everywhere in between. Really a sanity saver and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

For the uneducated, what does this actually do?

It searches the page for and removes all elements that have a "sticky" or "fixed" position. Elements positioned in those ways stay in the frame all the time, and are usually used for things like: videos that follow you, persistent chat buttons/windows, headers that stay in view even as you scroll, and page overlays.

StopTheMadness is not an ad blocker.

It can run user scripts though.

Can you give an example of sites encountered in regular browsing this helps with?

For example, the top bar on New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/riding-lon... .

Or a more obviously one, the HUGE top bar on Material Design site: https://material.io .

Stop the madness is great. Don’t think of it as an ad blocker (it helps with that but I use an ad blocker as well). It removes a lot of madness, like forms that suppress paste (or copy), text selection, auto play etc. Makes it possible to use a web browser.

That sounds great, but I wonder, have you run into issues with compatibility? That is, for sites that do incredibly annoying things like that, have you found that it ends up breaking things?

I haven’t noticed any problems and I’ve been using it for years.

That's good to hear! I might have to give it a go, then.

Honestly, I'm still a little conflicted in that, I don't know if it's "ethical" for me to block ads, if I myself use ads for one of my businesses to drum up sales. It seems kind of like a way to say "Others have to deal with this, but I don't." You know?

Either way, if it makes the browsing experience better, it might be worth it regardless.

> I'm still a little conflicted in that, I don't know if it's "ethical" for me to block ads

StopTheMadness is not an ad blocker, so there's no ethical dilemma in that respect.

well, i kinda gave up.

the problem is not exclusive to browsers at this point. it's the entire OS stack we need to take back. that said, i appreciate the energy put towards making things change. features like protecting copy and paste, and stopping autoplay brought a smile to my face.

the fight is right.

We're at the point where both MacOS and Windows have an advertising ID. It can be anonymized, but I can't just turn it off.

Not sure if this is true, but according to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers

you can opt out of this on MacOS by choosing the "Limit Ad Tracking" setting.

Note how it says "limit", not "stop" ad tracking.

Yes, it says "limit" because Apple cannot guarantee all 3rd party ad tracking stops in every piece of software. What it does is set your personalized advertising ID to all 0s, making you indistinguishable from 20% of Apple users. That is, it completely opts you out of Apple's tracking ID that the poster was complaining about.

I mentioned you can also turn off Windows personalized ID, but for some reason that post (and the instructions) were downvoted. The point remains that the advertising IDs the poster was talking about are optional from both Windows and Apple. Unless you consider the API returning a universal dummy value and not an error to be an issue.

I would argue the correct behavior is not sending it at all and having an error if the other side requests it. Why should my OS offer any information even a bucket of 20% of users?

On windows you can trivially turn it off [1]. Heck, it even prompts you to decide when you install the OS.

[1] On both 10&11: Start > Settings > Privacy & security > General. The name of the option differs between two, but look for the options that starts with "Let apps" and includes "advertising id"

>features like protecting copy and paste, and stopping autoplay brought a smile to my face.

This is what we get now when we had developers band together with those who want to protect their "content" that is not valuable enough to be published directly, nor is it original; yet they want to make sure that no one takes their amateur work and makes money from it before they do. This is what we get for wanting to create artist protections without needing formal frameworks or policies: the creatives find a way to do something, and then the replicators find ways to use it en masse.

Protecting content was not an issue after SEO, or before online payments for reading articles online, nor was it ever really necessary. All they do is make sure that those who are motivated to copy their content find ways to do so, with a hassle.

it's the entire OS stack we need to take back

we already have, it's called GNU/Linux with wine.

the number of apps that it can't run is getting less by the day

Is there a list of settings to change for eg. firefox (in about:config) on linux to achieve the same thing, maybe even without an extension?

One of the best additions to browsing I've used on a Mac. Found it via a search engine (remember when search was useful?) when sites began trying to keep users from right-clicking on links / opening links in new tabs. Highly recommended.

> The developer of StopTheMadness is Jeff Johnson, famous for solving the Mac OCSP appocalypse. Jeff's other software includes Link Unshortener, a Mac app that expands shortened web links, Tweaks for Twitter, a web browser extension for Mac and iOS that makes Twitter better, and StopTheScript, a Safari extension for iOS that stops all JavaScript on your selected websites.

If HCI/UX was a real thing, none of these remedial apps would be necessary, because users would have choice about how to operate the things they bought and paid for. Yet, all of these are solutions to fixing someone else's idea that they've imposed upon users. "Take back X" is slogan we're going to hear more and more of until we finally admit that consumer computing has become a battle between developers and users.

It might be a slogan that gets advertised more, but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock.

The amount of 'taking things back' might only apply to those who 'had' things to begin with, and only a subset of those that still want to 'have' things. I fear most people neither know nor want to know about any of this.

and that's exactly why we need to "take things back". for them. for those that don't know how it was and how it should be.

Technically yes, but if you give people a choice between "no instant gratification, click 10 buttons" and "click here to trade yourself for instant gratification" the latter will still be the selected choice and everything is still the same.

most of them yes. but as captain obvious would point out, not everyone's the same. I'm not one of those users. and you're not one of those users. and I understand "taking back" as "making it possible to be ok for users like me". and I appreciate anyone that does that for whatever thing tgat can be "taken back"

> but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock.

I really don't mean to direct this at you personally, I suspect you're just repeating things you've heard, or what you think other's think, but I sincerely believe this kind of latent contempt for users needs to stop. Are we all experts on what "users don't give a crap about" here? In another thread today [1] I made a similar remark about our willingness to suppose we know how "users" feel about privacy.

This feels wrong, like the equivalent of something like racism or sexism that should have died out in the 1980s.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618884

The word “User” itself is derogatory.

I'm basing it on metrics from networks I manage (and where a signed policy is in effect that law-mandated decryption proxies are in use). The crap people will still do on such networks is baffling, and we're not talking just white collar tech workers or something like that, it's all across the board. (granted, it's only about 150k users in western EU, 10k in Africa and 25k in canada, so may not be representative of the world at large) That experience combined with the number of visitors/users for those platforms I mentioned results in what I wrote.

For you and me, we already have plenty of options, there is no 'taking it back' because we already have it. If you use Iceweasel on Debian fore example, you're pretty much there already.

This does sound like useful empirical data. I'd love to hear more but suspect you're constrained by good manners/duty (if not actual confidentiality law) to say no more. Ping me if you feel like saying more about it please.

UX is not a real thing for companies. GX is. Growth experience. Growth in revenue that is. GX and UX might overlap (for example when Chrome first came out it was just a lot faster which is a better UX) but similarly everything considered “asshole design” is also GX.

In a way you seem to be saying that companies are incapable of producing good software. Is that true? I don't think it needs to be. Or do we have different ideas of what a "company" is? Sounds like what you are calling GX is a funny way of saying greed.

I think they were just exaggerating. Of course, companies can focus on UX rather than GX if they wanted to, but many prefer to optimize for growth than user experience.

They can produce good enough software. If great software is their differentiator then it will be great. If user hostility is their strategy you get that instead. Most are somewhere in between.

Given that most of this stuff is to deal with advertising, I’d argue that users haven’t bought or paid for the content in question and that’s the issue. We love “free” stuff.

>We love “free” stuff.

Not all of us. It's just that most of the time there's no other choice.

anything similar for firefox on linux ?

To, say, turn copy-paste back on and do many other little fixes?

I really dislike sites that forbid copy-paste (and I suppose there is a simple solution for that particular problem, like turning off some event in about:config), but I love the idea of fixing problems I did not even knew I had :D

From the Apple App Store regarding Safari settings:

This extension can read and alter webpages you visit and see your browsing history on all websites.

This includes sensitive information from webpages, including passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards.

The whole idea sounds great, even reasonably priced but... having to trust another company on all that seems too risky. They should offer a standalone browser instead of a Safari extension, so that the user can easily skip it when dealing with sensitive data.

Why a standalone browser when you can just disable the extension when you don’t want to use it?

Good point... I guess I’d still be a bit uneasy about it.

Hi, the company is just me, Jeff. I've been a Mac developer for over 15 years. There's a link to my résumé from the product page, as well as links to reviews of the extension from well-known tech media.

This is just the nature of JavaScript, it has the power to do pretty much anything in a web page. My goal is to write "good" JavaScript to counteract the "bad" JavaScript of user-hostile web pages.

So does this work on other operating systems or just macos?

Also iOS.

Been using it for years. Awesome app.

$8 lol

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