"Helpful" Thumbnails

Rafe Colburn:

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.