New FireFox Extension ...better than Ad-block

[memphish]

Go from this: (notice the site's content cant even fit into the screen on a 1280x1024 resolution...nice work J)

To this:

 

RIP stands for Remove it Permanently. This seriously awesome extension recently released version 1.0 so it's time for a post about it. What RIP does is allow you to right click on any page element and then remove it. poof, gone. Prior to removal, it will flash a red box around the area that will be removed so that you can make sure that only the stuff you want to be gone is actually removed. It removes the elements you don't want right out of the document tree and firefox will then neatly reflow everything as if the ad was never there in the first place. If you accidentally mess something up, there's a handy undo function in the edit menu.

 

RIP remembers what and where any elements you remove were so that thenext time you come back to a URL matching one of it's filters, it willkill it as soon as it sees it. Occasionally there is a slight delay inthis as the extension waits for the page to fully render so it can makesure the element to kill is the right one, but overall it workssuperbly. Think of it like Proxomitron's ad killing power with a GUI.

 

Killing single elements is useful, but RIP can also kill entire classesof elements with out needing to know about regexps or other fancyfiltering methods. The advanced RIP sub-menu offers the ability to killsimilar elements, the parent container element, and various options onwhich domains the filter should effect. For example, when I was killingads on anandtech.com, I noticed that I had the advanced option to killa div with class "adcontainer" so I nuked that and subsequently killedevery single ad on the site in one stroke. After applying a RIP to thesite, you can go in and tweak the range of URLs it effects by hand ifyou're so inclined.

 

One helpful hint is that clicking right next to something you want todelete often works better than clicking directly on it. That way you'llget the containing block as well as the element within. This isn'tfoolproof, so be sure to watch for the blinking highlight to make sureyou're removing what you really intend to.

 

Check out the mozdev page for some screen shots of RIP in action

http://rip.mozdev.org/

[CoasterFanatic]

^ Wow. I remember when that page looked like that.

 

It's been about 4 years.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20010405035601/http://coasterbuzz.com/

[Shadowforce]

It might be a quite time-consuming process to remove all the ads from a site, but the bittersweet feeling of revenge against the advertisers that has tormented me for so long evens it out. Thanks you VERY much for the link!

[memphish]

^ That's the great thing about RIP. If the ad's are all on the same domain you can usually kill an entire sites ads with one click. Just use the RIP Advanced and choose one of the options. The highlighted borders show what your about to block, and there is an undo function as well. But yes, killing all of Putz's iFrames and other crap took about 20 xPath queries.

[Shadowforce]

I just found a problem: It is not possible to remove Flash advertisments unless they are in an frame, because Firefox opens a Flash Player menu when you right-click on them. Do you know a workaround for this?

[memphish]

Yeah I noticed that too. ad-block's flash overlay will take care of it if you don't mind using two extensions. Can you link the site? Fortunatly, most flash ad's are in iFrames as far as I've noticed.

 

Tips from the dev site

Use the context menu to remove something. If you remove too much use the 'Undo Last Rip' on the edit menu to go back.

Don't click the context menu directly on an image, click on the surrounding areas instead. The reason for this is that images placed by 'Ad Servers' are typically random, i.e. sometimes it is an image, sometimes it might be a flash etc.

Rip cannot currently remove content contained within a IFrame within a document click near the iframe to remove the row containing the iframe. I will fix this in the next minor release.

Use the Options dialog to specify wildcard's within URL's once you have successfully Rip content from a single page. E.g. http://*.yahoo.com/* matches all webpages in the Yahoo domain. I will put an option to automatically do this when you initially rip content.

Use the standard Page Source to find the content you need to removed and look for common 'class' or 'id' attributes on div or table tags surrounding the content to remove. Then use the built-in XPath editor to specify more general XPath queries to find and remove this content generally rather than in a specific position. E.g. //div[@class=ad] will find and remove all content contained in a div tag which have a class attribute = 'ad'

[CstrzRock]

Sorry for being dumb... how do you install this?

[memphish]

Once you have firefox, go to http://rip.mozdev.org/. There is a link that says Install Rip Version 1.0.3. Click that. By default Firefox will block the site from installing software, and you will see a bar on top of the browser telling you so. On the right side of this bar is a button to Edit Options. Click that, then click allow for http://rip.mozdev.org/. Click the install link again. You will have a popup that will install the extension for you. Once it is finished restart firefox and you're set.

[CstrzRock]

Thanks a bunch!