Get rid of the NY Times dictionary popups!?

May 23, 2007 8:10 AM

How do I turn off the dictionary lookup popup thing on nytimes.com?

I'm one of those people that highlights words on a webpage while I'm reading it, and the NYTimes' javascript popup when a word is highlighted is driving me insane. Is there some cookie or something to disable it, or some user control panel config thing on Firefox I can use to turn off Javascript only for nytimes.com? Thanks!

posted by gramcracker to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Is This what you are referring to?
A greasemonkey script could probably be whipped together to reformat hyperlinks with the "intellitextLink" class if that's the declaration they use on nytimes.
posted by ktrey at 8:22 AM on May 23, 2007

"If you hate the NYTIMES "dictionary" feature too, and you are using Firefox with Adblock, block

*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

Definitions of "and" no more!"

posted by neustile at 8:24 AM on May 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Thanks neustile!
posted by gramcracker at 8:30 AM on May 23, 2007

ktrey, if you took 2 seconds from your life to actually look at the NYT instead of simply pulling something out of your butt, you'd see that the OPP is NOT about IntelliTXT.

Adblock will completely nuke it on Firefox, but Google Toolbar's popup blocker takes care of it on IE (ctrl-doubleclick will bypass the blocker, if you want to actually use it). I imagine any similar popup blocker will do it as well.
posted by mkultra at 8:34 AM on May 23, 2007

Chill. In accordance with the purpose of this site, my post was attempting to be helpful. I did view New York Times website, but was unable to find what the OPP was referring to after viewing and highlighting several articles. I had recently read something regarding IntelliTXT, and thought that the technologies used by nytimes might be similar.
posted by ktrey at 8:57 AM on May 23, 2007

Is there a way to do it in Firefox without using Adblock?
posted by grouse at 11:27 AM on May 23, 2007

grouse - adblock is clearly the right tool here. If you're not using adblock because you want to suuport websites' revenue streams, you can skip the step where you subscribe to a blacklist and block only the ads that annoy you (like intellitext).

Alternately, you could probably use the NoScript extension, or disable javascript in your browser. Those will be more intrusive to your browsing on other websites, though.
posted by chrisamiller at 3:41 PM on May 23, 2007

I'm not using Adblock because I want to minimize the number of add-ons I have installed.
posted by grouse at 3:46 PM on May 23, 2007

If you already have Greasemonkey, here's a GM script that will do the trick (you have to restart the browser for it to start working, though)
posted by estherbester at 10:42 AM on May 26, 2007