Ask HN: Death to blatantly obstructuve popups. What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Death to blatantly obstructuve popups. What do you think?

7 pointspcostache18 comments

Hi! I've slowly but surely started to dread these damn blatant popups - from cookies and product updates to free offers. It's just so damn annoying that they interrupt the flow of the user experience.

I've been thinking of a few ways to make these popups way less "in your face", but still noticeable to a visitor interested in a site's product/service.

Do you think anyone would pay for something like that, or do I just live in a bubble?

Thanks!

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Um, you know most browsers have built-in popup blockers? Look under Settings.

https://blog.getadblock.com/how-to-disable-pop-up-blockers-i... -- https://www.google.com/search?q=popup+blocker

Not sure if there's ever been a 'make them less noticeable' plugin.

Don’t these reference pop ups that appear in new windows? I assume the OP here is talking about the large overlays that appear over content after you’ve scrolled about 15% or been on the site for 2 minutes.

Yep, that's it

Hey! I'm refering to the overalys/modals that obstruct the content of the page when they are visible. I dont think you can bypass those, at least not without going mad.

Note: prefer uBlock Origin over getadblock since it's FOSS

uBlock does not block them. For exmaple, you can go to nike.com with uBlock on and still see these annoying popups.

Because you haven't enabled any additional lists, I have, I do not see any popups.

Yeah one could publish a browser extension that hides these in-app popups, and could even be diligent over time to provide frequent updates to improve identification of such popus that are constantly diversified and need manual maintainer labor to get them all blocked. It would be cool, but i won't pay and anyway broswer extensions don't work on mobile where i spend 50% of my screen time. An alternative is to implement a vpn that proxies the OS's ssl traffic and removes popups from html content, but it has to have system trusted certificates and will break apps with certificate pinning anyway. Your only tool is to make your legislators remove popups the same way they introduced them

No, people won’t pay for that.

Especially: you’re going to make a free version of that stuff to attract people, and then use dark patterns to get them to sign up, and eventually pay to use your stuff. And that whole process is going to require pop ups and other crap of that nature that your potential customers wanted to avoid in the first place.

Try a non-free ad blocker to see what I mean.

Sure, I'd like something like that. I don't know if I would pay for it. I've paid for related things though; various ad/tracker blocking software and even hardware. Here is a free and custom but slightly annoying to set up (and prone to requiring maintenance) method:

Step 1: Install Stylus browser add-on (or equally privacy-respecting equivalent)

Step 2: When a site makes the vision-obstructing (cookies-warning/Google-login/donation-request) dialog, add an appropriate local CSS rule to block it (same domain if site-specific; wildcard domains if generic).

Step 3: Eventually, all sites you regularly visit to will no longer have these annoyances.

Step 4: Remember to export up the local CSS file and back it up in case it needs to be restored/reused.

Thanks for the input! On the other hand - as a visitor of a website , would you be more likely to observe & engage with to a nicely designed, non-intrusive popup ?

To answer:

- If the dialog is not intrusive/blocking/annoying, I would not waste the time/effort hiding it.

- I would only interact with if it gives me something I want in either case.

- I never want to "sign in with Google" "configure cookies", or "donate" because of some popup, though.

> I've slowly but surely started to dread these damn blatant popups - from cookies and product updates to free offers.

Install uBlock Origin and turn it on.

Almost all of the pop-ups will disappear.

I have.. for example, if you go to nike.com , do you see the cookies popup?

No cookie popup, but I also have my uBlock configured to default deny all javascript, which also results in blocking the cookie popup.

Turning on JS for only "nike.com" and "nikecdn.com" to make most of the images appear, and I still do not see a cookie popup.

I would pay for this

At least a buck a year

Maybe 5

Maybe 10

Maybe more

Would easily be worth it

But would have to work

Prob a real trial period

Best if I could pay monthly or every three months so I can bail when OP gets bored with it

Hahaha , thanks for the input !

uBlock Origin's element zapper does a fine job of making all those irritating overlays disappear.

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