Content Blocking by CSS in Safari

ahknight writes "There's a nice summary of how to get various kinds of content, in this case ads, blocked from being displayed via a custom stylesheet you add to your browser. This is mainly for Gecko-based browsers and rather old news, but the good news is that it also appears to work in the ... umm ... latest version of Safari."

Comments

Ad blocking Good

[jasoncart]

I'd prefer to see the ads if it keeps the sites I enjoy reading in business.

There's a limit

[metamatic]

I didn't mind ads for a while, but when certain sites (ahem) started putting in those huge mega-ads that take up more than half my browser window, I had to start doing some ad blocking to make the web usable. It was either that or learn to
read
text
that
looks
like
this.

Tragedy of the commons and all that. The people whose ads are being blocked should get angry at the idiots who force us to block ads by making their ads so huge, obnoxious and badly-placed.

Stupid layout

[wowbagger]

The problem isn't so much the ads, rather it is the fact that the webmaster(baters) who create these sites set up their layouts assuming your screen is 800x600. Therefor, since the ads are 160 wide, and there are two of them (one on each side), that leaves 800-(2*160) = 400 (that's the sort of math these morons use) for the article.

So, if you are running a 1600x1200 window and larger fonts (anti-aliasing? I need no anti-aliasing!)
you
get
an
article
like
this .

If the morons would either

• use a "width=*" for the article
• Come to an agreement as to what class the actual article text would be

then there wouldn't be a problem - large browser users like me would either get an article that spans the available space (the width option) or could at least override the setting on the article text in our CSS (the common class option).

I've contacted several sites about this. For example, PBS (hosters of the Cringely articles) responded saying "Some people don't like long lines of text, so there!" (OK, then they can resize their windows to get the line length they want.)

Unfortunately, since every site uses a slightly different "width=", and since CSS does not allow you to say "width=[400..800]" or something like that, you have to have a seperate entry for each site, and when the webmaster(bater) changes the layout you have to update your CSS and restart your browser.

I do wish people would realise that HTML is about giving enough info to my browser to render the page, not about being pixel-exact.

Solves half the problem

[crow]

This solves half the problem. The other half is that the ads are still loaded, just not displayed. I'm using a variant of the style sheet hack, along with Proxy Auto Config to redirect requests to ad sites to a server that returns transparent gifs for every request. It works much like JunkBuster, only it's integrated with the browser, so you don't have the side effects of using a proxy for every request (e.g., it's not any slower).

Now I hardly ever see ads, and the ads I don't see never get loaded in the first place, saving my bandwidth. Of course, that means that the web sites I visit never record a hits on their ad servers from me, whereas using the style sheet alone is completely transparent to the server.

Oh, and both the Proxy Auto Config and the Style Sheet hacks should work just fine with most web browsers, not just Mozilla and Safari.