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Comment by brokenparser | Hacker News Reader

Give me back my vertical screen real estate!

(inspect element... untick position: fixed... done)

Oh! There was an article down there! I'm embarrassed to say that I genuinely didn't notice it. I just closed the tab in disappointment.

Also, the scrolling is broken. You press "Page Down", and you miss some of the text that scrolls by. This is suboptimal.

I don't recall having hit the site before. But I've got a Stylebot CSS that fixes just that issue.

I have a dotjs extension (firefox) which sole purpose is to prevent those pesky huged fixed headers.

Can you provide a link? This is probably my hugest pet peeve when it comes to browsing the internet. I have no idea how fixed headers became so trendy and I find them absurdly painful. I tend to read at the top of the page and scroll down to keep my current line near the top, and (large) fixed headers really mess with that. Small ones can still be annoying, but some like Facebook's aren't that bad.

I even asked a question on the superuser stack exchange about blocking them, but it never got very useful results.

I don't tend to read right at the top of the page, but I do scroll with the spacebar. It's infuriating when what's supposed to be a one-page scroll skips over three lines because they're blocked by navigation I'll never use.

Here is the link to the extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dotjs/

And here is the code for `~/.js/_kill-position-fixed`:

    $('div,a').css('position',
      function (index, value) {
        if (value == 'fixed')
          return 'static'
        }
    )

Then I just link the domain name of the offending website to that file:

    ~/.js $ ls -l
    _kill-position-fixed
    polygon.com.js    -> _kill-position-fixed
    techcrunch.com.js -> _kill-position-fixed

I don't remember where or from who I copied this though.

I'm not on my main box, so I can't give you links, but there are extensions for both Chrome and Firefox to add a "remove this element" entry in the right click menu.

Sometimes, it takes a bit of perseverance to get rid of nested elements; sometimes you accidentally nuke the <body>...

Most of the time it works fine.

The Element Inspector (in Chrome) and Firebug (in Firefox) will let you interactively modify the DOM.

If you want to make changes permanent, Stylebot or Stylish are useful. Stylebot is Chrome-only, Stylish exists for both browsers.

I just kill them one-at-a-time via Stylebot myself. If I don't feel like fixing a site, I'll just close the tab or hit it in Readability.

Totally agree with you, however.

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