SKIP IT button

July 28, 2004 6:23 PM

I just gave up on two pages in quick succession; the first hung while it waited and waited on something from akamai, which was apparently taking a nap just then, and the second while it waited and waited on something from doubleclick, equally asleep. Like I care whether a page manages to do its dirty background business with doubleclick. Is there any browser that has a [SKIP IT] button you can click that means "give up on what you're trying to get right now, skip over it, go on and load the rest of the page"? Would such a button be feasable?Or have I been missing something that's been in front of me all the time?
posted by jfuller to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

i usually hit stop, and hopefully get the page without the ad or whatever it was that was making it hang. For news sites, it usually works because the text loads first, i find.
posted by amberglow at 6:44 PM on July 28, 2004

You could add the domain to your hosts file and block it there. Then it would never try to load.
posted by y6y6y6 at 6:46 PM on July 28, 2004

Should have added details and instructions....... My bad.
posted by y6y6y6 at 6:48 PM on July 28, 2004

Even better--just get Firefox, and throw in the "AdBlock" extension. It'll block the browser from trying to load most ads right out of the box, and you can add other sources to block as you go on.

That's a more specific answer than the broad question you asked, but since this mostly happens with ads, anyway, it should be just what you need. (And no offense, y6, but a lot easier than editing your hosts file--you can just right-click on an ad, and choose to block the domain right from your browser.)
posted by LairBob at 8:11 PM on July 28, 2004

If I understand correctly, (and Mike, please jump in here if I have it wrong), our own skallas has an adblocking hosts file thingy that will do exactly what you wish.
posted by Lynsey at 11:08 PM on July 28, 2004

most browsers load separate parts of the page in spearate threads, as far as i know, so stop should work just fine, since other parts will have loaded separately (you may not see the whole page because the layout engine needs the dimensions of the stalled part, but i think that's only true for older browsers). so if stop doesn't work then it sounds like they're constructing the page in such a way to purposefully mess things up (eg the ad loads the text, or javascript loads text after the ad appears, perhaps), in which case a "skip" button isn't going to help. i guess.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:28 AM on July 29, 2004

most browsers load separate parts of the page in spearate threads

It's called pipelining, but it's not enabled by default in Mozilla/Firefox. Type about:config into your address box, type pipe into the filter field, and change network.http.pipelining to true.

Pipelining works by making a whole bunch of requests, one after another, to the server; the responses (the parts of the page) are received in that order. Since the requests/responses aren't made/received in separate program threads, a nonresponsive server could still hold up the page transfer. Of course, this depends on how the browser organizes its requests; I don't know if Mozilla sorts its requests by server or if it just calls on the fly. If it's the latter, then you could still run into this problem.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 6:44 AM on July 29, 2004