Agreed.

Ublock Origin's right-click / Block Element (then optional selection process) is an absolute boon to forever hide these artefacts.

Every now and then I'll try reading something on mobile chrome, or a friend's machine, and realise how annoying much of the web is for many people.

I had to turn off JS on mobile chrome for almost all websites, because they just wouldn't run on my phone.

Firefox for Android -- you can install extensions to block extra JS.

It should be unacceptable that you have to install plug-ins and disable "features" in order to configure your browser to not be actively destroying the web browsing experience--which is the only experience you expect out of a web browser. Browser vendors need to take some responsibility too.

Talking about uBlock Origin and Medium, the blocked requests on Medium pages always seem to increase at a regular interval.

Seems like they use some kind of tracker that "polls" user activity on the page. I suspect that's why Chrome seems to use more CPU/RAM when I've got more Medium pages opened.

That's all well and good until you get those annoying modals that say something like "We see you are using an adblocker, please disable it to continue".

Some sites you can easily dismiss and they'll let you browse after (which makes the modal pointless) and other sites won't let you past unless you disable adblocking for that site.

I've had somewhat-good results by just disabling Javascript entirely for domains like that.

uMatrix if you want detailed control.