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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

At least this should theoretically make it easier to block those horrible popup modals, if they're all grouped under one element:

    dialog {display:none}

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Not a chance. The websites with the worst popups probably couldn’t care less about something like <dialog>. It’s all <div> and JavaScript for them.

Plus, the worst offenders have a vested interest in making those hard to block. For example, my 2 common offenders are Twitter and reddit displaying modals on mobile prompting for app download. Both companies have no interest in making these easy to block.

I click on most of those sites from search. So my fix is: cmd+w or ctrl+w.

In the meantime, NoScript[1] frequently avoids popups entirely by just showing the page contents with no JS at all, and Kill Sticky[2] cleans up the pages that require JS to show you the content you actually want. As a bonus, it also nukes those stupid sticky headers!

[1] NoScript for Firefox (incl. mobile) & Chrome-based desktop browsers: https://noscript.net/getit/

[2] Kill Sticky bookmarklet for all browsers including mobile: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

Or, a Firefox extension that adds a toolbar button: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/

+1 for Kill Sticky. I map a hotkey to it and I can't imagine using the web without it anymore.

It kills every annoying modal and gives 100% of window height to content instead of annoying headers and footers.

Between Kill Sticky and an ad blocker, it basically feels like using the web as it was originally intended. For content.

(Also an extension to stop videos from auto playing, ever since that scourge started a few years ago.)

I've found Firefox's built-in autoplay controls work well enough for video, but I'm still curious to know what extension you use for that.

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