Monday, September 14, 2009

Remove intrusive bing popups from content sites


Today as I was pursuing the moneycentral.com site, in my quest to acquire the financial knowledge of the Wall Street robber barons, I stumbled on the latest feature from Bing : annoying hover over popups that show a search listing.

They are rather annoying for two reasons:
1) They appear over the text you are reading
2) It is very difficult to navigate around them as all you need to do is to have the mouse cursor on the link area for the helpful popup to appear

So I modified my previous GreaseMonkey script to handle this as well. Fortunately it is easy as this popup is fired off an anchor tag with an attribute of "itxtdid". All we need to do is remove the attribute, and the popup gets disabled.

Below is the new script. Enjoy.

// ==UserScript==
// @name test
// @namespace http://userscripts.org/thushara/
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==
var allLinks, thisLink;
allLinks = document.evaluate(
'//a[@href]',
document,
null,
XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
null);
for (var i = 0; i < allLinks.snapshotLength; i++) {
thisLink = allLinks.snapshotItem(i);
// do something with thisLink
if (thisLink.href.substring(0,19)=="http://www.bing.com") {
thisLink.removeAttribute("href");
}
if (thisLink.hasAttribute("itxtdid")) {
thisLink.removeAttribute("itxtdid");
}
}

20 comments:

Unknown said...

How about us non-code-savvy Firefox users. I don't know how to follow your instructions. Bing is so annoying. I like to move the pointer along the text as I read. It helps me focus on the text better. But I can't do that with Bing stalking me. Help!

Marian

Stryder said...

You totally just made my day. Thank you!

Anonymous said...

Great...I got here by Googling "bing popups," and find your article about as helpful as tits on a hog. I guess I need to learn how to program my own browser?

Anonymous said...

Yeah, the nerve of the author of this article to not dumb it down so that the less intelligent members of our society can make heads or tails of it. The previous poster feels the need to announce to the world that he/she is incapable of browsing google hits and finding more than one of them. Idiot. Since you cannot grasp the functionality of an internet search engine, I doubt you will have much success trying to learn to program your own browser, much less HTML.

Anonymous said...

I've always hated know-it-all dickheads that can say nothing but rtfm. If you can't post something helpful, move on.

Anonymous said...

Step by step:
1) Open the IE options.
This can be done by using the Tools menu within IE and selecting “Internet Options”, by right-clicking on the IE icon on your desktop or Start menu and selecting “Internet Options”, or by launching “Internet Options” from inside the Windows Control Panel.
2) From the IE Options window, select the Security tab
3) From within the security tab, click on the “Restricted sites” icon and then click the [Sites] button right below it.
4) A list box window will pop up. In the “Add this website to the zone:” filed type in *.intellitxt.com then click the [Add] button

Anonymous said...

Step by step:
1) Open the IE options.
This can be done by using the Tools menu within IE and selecting “Internet Options”, by right-clicking on the IE icon on your desktop or Start menu and selecting “Internet Options”, or by launching “Internet Options” from inside the Windows Control Panel.
2) From the IE Options window, select the Security tab
3) From within the security tab, click on the “Restricted sites” icon and then click the [Sites] button right below it.
4) A list box window will pop up. In the “Add this website to the zone:” filed type in *.intellitxt.com then click the [Add] button

Seth said...

Those last two posted by annonymous (9:17 and 9:18) work great. All you do is block "*.intellitxt.com." Beautiful!

Anonymous said...

Intellitxt.com step 5) Close Internet Explorer. The next time you open Internet Explorer the change takes place.

Anonymous said...

Going through Internet Options and blocking it worked very good. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

I just did the IE Restricted Sites update; we're all happy! Thanks whoever figured this out.

Anonymous said...

This is great, but how about for Firefox or Chrome?

Katherine said...

I really want to thank whoever came up with the quick solution for those of us who don't want to program.

On to manners. Although I spent several years as a programmer from assembler on up, that doesn't make me a better person than someone who couldn't program in basic. I don't chose to program at this time. That doesn't mean that the person who wrote that code wasn't providing a valuable service. It would have been possible to ask to have a less technical answer without being rude about it.

Next person. Just because some of us have other ways to spend our time does not make the programmer either more or less valuable to society. I would not like to see a world without tech saavy programmers in it to keep all my neat gadgits going. I also would not like to see a world without garbage collectors, or shop clerks, teachers, hairdressers, waiter/esses. Maybe I wouldn't mind if we dropped telephone soliciters, but only if there's another way for them to earn money. The fact is, unless you do nothing all day but count money someone else earned for you, you have a valuable place in the world and I wish people would be more kind to one another. I can only imagine that you all doubt your own self-worth if you have to rant at other people to make your day.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the fast and easy to understand fix

Anonymous said...

The posted code doesnt work completely as it only blocks one of the sites and not the intelli site as well.

Anonymous said...

you are wonderful! thank you so much - this worked like a charm!

Anonymous said...

The fix adding the site in Internet Options works for both Firefox and Chrome. So easy to do and what a great fix! Thanks for sharing it. I am passing it along to everyone I know.

thushara said...

thanks for all the comments. i'm pretty bad at giving detailed steps. but you need to get a hang of Greasemonkey>

Unknown said...

I tried the fix... *.intellitxt ... but I get an error claiming it's unacceptable. I tried several acceptable formats but it rejects those too. Must have changed IE.
Boy I hate my computer doing things I have not specifically asked it to do.

Anonymous said...

For the Firefox user (and others?), a simple approach is available. You need two Firefox addons (a) Adblock Plus and (b) Element Finding Helper for Adblock Plus. Whilst these can be somewhat complex, basic installing and use is very simple.

You'll use the Element Finder to point at what you want blocked, then that'll add it to Adblock Plus, and voila.

The exact same method will block Google's hover previews too, and many other things you might want to block. Go easy though, in case you block a site to death!