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June 27, 2009 9:59 AM Subscribe
What do web designers call the slideshowy flipbook of stories that appears in the upper left corner of these news websites? Are there effective ways to block or replace these (browser plugins, Greasemonkey scripts, etc.)?
Yeah, I second the recommendation of AdBlock Plus and would add NoScript. The latter eliminates all javascript content by default, and you will have to whitelist the sites that should be allowed to run it; depending on your browsing habits this can be a blessing or a bit of extra work. On the other hand this will eliminate practically all ads, auto-playing slideshows and distracting blinky animated things in one fell swoop...
posted by PontifexPrimus at 12:03 PM on June 27, 2009
posted by PontifexPrimus at 12:03 PM on June 27, 2009
Best answer: I've heard these referred to as flipbooks, slideshows, rotators, and "step-in-place navigation", but there isn't a standardized name for them that I'm aware of.
Short of scorched-earth solutions like disabling javascript entirely, removing these would have to be handled case by case because each site is doing it slightly differently. Adblock, nice as it is, won't help in this situation because they're not images and they're not Flash.
One way to do it, if there are particular sites that do this which you visit often, would be to install Stylish and then add your own CSS to hide the offending elements from those sites -- for ocregister.com for example you'd add.scroller {display:none} and for duluthnewstribune.com .featureStories_box {display:none} ...and so on. Basically just view source and find the classname or ID of the element you want to remove, and set it to display:none.
(Or you could hack together your own quick greasemonkey script to do the same thing; Stylish might be a bit easier to get started with though.)
posted by ook at 2:12 PM on June 27, 2009 [2 favorites]
Short of scorched-earth solutions like disabling javascript entirely, removing these would have to be handled case by case because each site is doing it slightly differently. Adblock, nice as it is, won't help in this situation because they're not images and they're not Flash.
One way to do it, if there are particular sites that do this which you visit often, would be to install Stylish and then add your own CSS to hide the offending elements from those sites -- for ocregister.com for example you'd add
(Or you could hack together your own quick greasemonkey script to do the same thing; Stylish might be a bit easier to get started with though.)
posted by ook at 2:12 PM on June 27, 2009 [2 favorites]
You could also make a user style sheet if you're not using Firefox.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:05 PM on June 27, 2009
posted by kirkaracha at 5:05 PM on June 27, 2009
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Not all of them are the same technology though, most look like Flash, some seem to be javascript enabled.
My first thought would be to just use AdBlock for Firefox. It will let you block all Flash using filters, although you may have to target it manually once or twice. For the javascript image based slidehows, Adblock will also let you block an image by right-clicking on it.
posted by jeremias at 11:48 AM on June 27, 2009