Is there a way to view Amazon without all the crap

March 23, 2009 9:17 PM

Is there a pared down, simplified version of amazon.com available anywhere? Right now whenever I go there I'm irritated by the fact that 90% of every page is noise. I want to browse, search and generally shop, and I don't mind 'stuff other people who bought this bought' and reviews, but I don't want to see a huge long page with all this other stuff on it.
posted by jcruelty to shopping (11 comments total)

You could try the "mobile" version (usually used for cell phone browsers).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/h.html
posted by CrayDrygu at 9:32 PM on March 23 [1 favorite]

If you fake an iPhone user agent you can use m.amazon.com (or the address CrayDrygu linked) and get the iPhone version. It's not ideal on a desktop, but at least it's largely crap-free.

If you use Safari you can activate the Develop menu in Preferences and fake the user agent that way.
posted by jedicus at 9:36 PM on March 23

Amazon Light is the canonical example, but it's hard on the eyes in a different way.
posted by majick at 9:54 PM on March 23

I have a greasemonkey script called Collapsible Amazon that makes each (well almost all) sections collapsible, so I have the Listmania and Frequently Bought Together and many other sections collapsed, and it remembers your choices from page to page, closing Firefox and everything.
posted by thebazilist at 9:56 PM on March 23 [1 favorite]

Along thebazilist's lines, there's a FF extension that works with Adblock Plus called the Element Hiding Helper that lets you hide parts of the page. You need the elements you select to have some kind of unique ID (if it's just something like TR or DIV you'll end up hiding the whole page) but I just checked and amazon seems pretty good about labelling its elements usefully. I just hid the "Customers who bought this also bought..." and found it very satisfying.
posted by trig at 10:06 PM on March 23 [1 favorite]

Greasemonkey is your friend, as thebazilist and trig point out, not just for amazon but any cluttered page.
posted by pemdasi at 1:26 AM on March 24

Along the same lines as above, if using Firefox, there's a Remove It Permanently add-on that may assist in cleaning things up.
posted by hungrysquirrels at 5:38 AM on March 24

There is Cleaner Amazon for Stylish. Stylsih is Greasmonkey for CSS. Yuu can install the userstyles.org styles in Greasemonkey as well, but Stylish is made for stuff like this.
posted by tallus at 7:57 AM on March 24

Try this for just books on a virtual shelf.
posted by Wilberto at 8:26 AM on March 24

Thanks for the suggestions yall. So far I've tried the mobile version (too stripped down) and Amazon Light (too stripped down). I think the Greasemonkey stuff is gonna be the way to go but haven't had time to try it yet... remove it permanently or element hiding sounds good too. Will update later with what worked out best.
posted by jcruelty at 3:24 PM on March 26

Collapsible Amazon seems to do the trick. I installed Remove This Permanently but couldn't figure out what patterns I need or what configuration would work... still a very useful add-on though!
posted by jcruelty at 1:51 PM on June 9