More and more, websites are making sidebars that actively scroll through other article headings or whatever while I’m trying to read. This bugs the shit out of me. I hate having moving things in my peripheral vision. I’m using the latest version of firefox. I have adblock installed; I’m not seeing ads, just parts of the actual website.
While we’re at it, I equally hate when sidebars move down as I scroll down the page. Why has web design become so damn annoying? How do I make it stop?
I would suggest trying the “NoScript” addon. While it might be heavy-handed for your needs, it allows you to block many kinds of annoying popup/sidebars/flash animations/etc.
I use NoScript as ICMB suggests, it allows you to control which source you see content from on each webpage.
I tried NoScript a few years ago, and it drove me crazy with popups asking me whether to allow things or not. It was more annoying than the stuff it was blocking. Has this changed, or was I doing it wrong?
I don’t get popups, I selected the option to place messages at the bottom. All I have is a little S symbol in the bottom right corner that expands when I click on it to show what is blocked on that page.
Could you link to one of these sites? I’ve never seen a website that automatically scrolled for you.
http://www.gaitsofgold.net/Gaited-Horse-FAQs/my-horse-wont-canter.html
The right sidebar scrolls rapidly (takes a couple of seconds to start). I’ve been seeing this a lot lately.
When I go to that page with NoScript, I get no scrolling and the text on the sidebar displays with lines through it. I can still read the “My Horse Won’t Canter” article just fine.
When I allow gaitsofgold.net then I get the scrolling.
Yeah, but did NoScript pop up and ask you if you wanted to allow it? Last time I had it installed, every new webpage I went to was greeted with a NoScript popup.
No pop up. In NoScript Preferences (or Options), click the Notifications tab, then untick the ‘Show messages about blocked scripts’ option.
Get the Adblock Element Blocking Helper and hide that entire sidebar.
Is there a javascript button for Firefox? I use K-Meleon which like Firefox uses Mozilla. I simply hit the “Javascript off” button and it stops all javascript on a page. Then I hit the “javascript on” button to turn it back on.
If K-Meleon has something like that, seems like Firefox should.
Renee, it sounds like you should check out YesScript. It just has a list (that you make using Tools -> Add-ons) of websites that aren’t allowed to use JavaScript. I add it to Firefox on every computer I use. I have about five websites I immediately add that are unusable when they are allowed to use Javascript.
I found NoScript too heavy-handed as well. YesScript doesn’t have any popups.
Thanks for all the advice. Right now I’m trying the NoScript with notifications off; if it drives me crazy I’ll try YesScript.
You do have to “temporarily allow” a lot of sites using NoScript though. What can be done simply using bog standard HTML is too often implemented with javascript.
Since you’re using Firefox, allow me to make yet one more suggestion, the Readability plugin. It generally works very well at de-cluttering pages with articles on them so that you get just the content of the article in a clear font that you can actually configure. You just click a button when you want to de-clutter an article.
Since you’re already using NoScript, I’ll mention that you can set it up to work like YesScript. Check “Scripts globally allowed” on the General tab in the options. This will allow everything, and then you can go through and block what you don’t want.
I tend to use it to block sites that have scripts other people are supposed to add to their pages–the sheer number some use can slow things down tremendously.
BTW, I originally got it so I could copy-and-paste from Snopes.