Today I was reading this article, which “helpfully” offers thumbnails of the pages each link points to, powered by Snap. I guess this is supposed to provide value to users, but it doesn’t. It’s just harassment.
I concur. I first noticed this on Techcrunch and thought it was interesting from an integration perspective. I've since seen these popouts explode all over the place and I can’t stand them.
This is the kind of stuff that should be enabled on the client with a browser extension or Greasemonkey script but it seems we'll be using client side tech to disable the crap that’s thrown at us from the server instead.
At this point I went looking for a Greasemonkey script to disable these Snap previews and quickly found that Snap let’s you disable them directly and centrally. That’s really cool and also unexpected.
I suppose I don’t have anything to complain about today, people – as you were.
Discuss
There’s something just odd about going to a company site to opt out of something you didn’t ask for in the first place. I've simply configured adblock to kill the preview Javascript.
— Adam Kalsey on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 at 05:12 PM #
What Adam said; don’t forget that even if you use their opt-out feature, they get to log every page you visit. It’s better to block the thing at the client – along with a metrid crapload of things like AdSense, Google Analytics, Doubleclick and a myriad others.
These days I prefer to do that by running a proxy server on my own machine; specifically, an Apache with mod_proxy. That way, I can rewrite requests from any HTTP client (including
wget, my package manager et al) at will. Mostly I use this to block ads but it’s also useful for things like redirecting requests to prdownloads.sourceforge.net directly to my download mirror of choice without having to endure the gateway page. Another reason to do it is so that I can turn off Firefox’ own disk cache and minimise its in-memory cache, all of which helps to keep it from gorging my RAM. I am toying with the idea of parsing any HTML content that refers to FeedBurner to resolve the FeedBurner-rewritten URIs before the content gets into the cache, so I that I may be rid of that plague. There are lots of reasons on today’s web to want total control of your browsing experience…— Aristotle Pagaltzis on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 at 11:43 PM #
Thank you! I've been searching for a greasemonkey script for the last … I guess 30 minutes or so. Really helpful to find something that actually works.
— Martijn Engler on Monday, July 30, 2007 at 04:49 AM #
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