>> partly due to janky JS and bloat

Are there any effective browser extensions to intelligently prevent things like a "Subscribe to our newsletter" popover?

I'm trying to think how i could tell uBlock origin to intercept any element with a high z-index which has it's ".display" attribute changed only in response to a timer or a scroll event.

In firefox i have the "I don't care about cookies" plugin and i genuinely forget that noise exists on the web until i use another browser and it all comes flooding back. I'm hoping there's something similar for this endemic cruft the web has been filled with.

Reader mode can be useful. NoScript can be useful but can also be painful.

My solution is to close the browser tab whenever a popover appears. I always have plenty of other open tabs to read.

Yeah.

I used to dive into the console and start removing stuff and even went so far as to write a bookmarklet that tries to identify and nuke anything with fixed position and reset the height to auto on body/html but ... if someone's going to be that user hostile it's not worth my time.

When this happens I'll copy the url, close the tab and paste it into archive.is.

same here. I don't even get mad anymore, just instantly close the page. This includes the cookie popup as well on mobile.

I tried this method, but i'm finding it impossible to book movie tickets when I keep closing the window on their homepage.

From the same author as "I don't care about cookies":

https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/

I haven't personally tried it yet, but I'm tempted.

Edit: it's a subscription. No, thanks. I much prefer the crowdsourcing model, which allows the entire world to have it (and contribute to it), and not only those who can pay such prices (that are quite expensive in most of the world, including where I live).

The problem I would think is the overlap for this of users who want jank removed from web pages and those who would choose to pay for it if optional is small.

It may be small in proportion, but large enough so that a Kickstarter could raise enough money to create and free the code as opensource.

Another subscription service and software you can't actually buy is much worse than the annoyance of pop overs. Does it atleast keep working without updates after a year?

I'm using uBlock Origin, don't get any of that. Be sure to enable all the "annoyance" filter lists in the settings.

I think it's about the websites you visit. If you only use "tech-y" or smaller niche websites you don't come across them. But if you visit websites like from the big news media or even niche websites that are not in English. There are filters for all major languages but there are certainly fewer skilled filter writers with time and willingness to write them in other languages.

There's also a gap of websites that are big enough to have this corporativist behavior of putting annoying... objects in their webpages, but not big enough that enough people visit to the point where it's likely that one of them will write the script.

Especially because, like, I do write some stuff for userstyles and userscripts sometimes, but I won't publish them unless I think they'll be useful for at least a small group of people, which I never seem to think will happen for websites in my mother tongue for some reason.

uBlock origin and uMatix combined:

- Globally blacklist malicious JS (and other features) within uMatrix.

- uBlock Origin's "Annoyances" filter is highly effective.

- UBO's element remover tool is also quite good, and permanently removes misfeatures.

For added leverage, on desktop, I use Stylish to write custom CSS rules that assign annoyances the CSS property "display: none !important". This is typically on a site-by-site basis, though there may be some common targets that can be addressed either globally or with a standard stylesheet applied to multiple sites.

All of which is a pain, agreed, but less of one than not doing so.

uBlock reminds me every day why I like HN so much with its big fat “0” on my browser border

https://scribe.rip extracts medium text without javascript

It's a little more manual but I like having Behind the Overlay installed. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-overlay...

It's a one click removal. It's nice because I dont have to search for the nearly transparent x or tiny no thanks, I can just muscle memory to the same button in the toolbar of my browser every time.

Not for mobile...

I know that such prompts are not technically pop up windows, but they are in spirit. I really wish the major search engines would penalize sites that use them, or that we would get browsers that started blocking them.

Yeah, the best solution is NoScript. It's not too painful as you tune your whitelist. It sucks, but it's better than the frigging popups. Even works well in Firefox for Android, which is a game changer.

Yes. I use tamper monkey to write scripts for sites I visit frequently that have annoying popups, content blocks (like chat) and link-jacking (streaming sports sites).

When NoScript becomes a pain it's time to close that tab.

Give me a break. Medium is fine. The webfont they use is fine. Their jank is nonzero but minimal.

Sure, fine, whatever, The Web Is Worse Than It Used To Be. I wish every text-driven website (news, blogs, etc) rendered with zero jank and zero JS required. But Medium really isn't much worse here than everyone else. Their pages are more cluttered than they used to be, which sucks, but they're clearly just victims of the same forces driving all other commercial websites to do the same things.

>We should have a HN guideline to add (Medium) to the title when the URL itself obfuscates that fact.

100% agree !

There is Scribe, at least as an alternaive front-end:

https://scribe.rip/please-stop-using-grey-text-3d3e71acfca8?...

It's similar in spirit to Invidious, Nitter, Teddit, and Bibliogram.

Medium is (so far) the ultimate manifestation of "Eternal September".

It doesn't just save people the technical effort of making a blog, but people think that it saves them the marketing effort -- which is a lot more effort.

Coulda posted it as a text submission to HN so that it would be all grey text on beige background.

Indeed! From the article:

> And before we continue, let’s make it absolutely clear that we have no control of the color of the text in this very article, as it is hosted through Medium.com, which features poor visual accessibility of their site design.

Why do they do that? They even have their own domain, they can get a domain but they can't host text themselves and choose their own colors?

Medium unfortunately simply doesn't work on my phone. It shows the first paragraph of text, then just nothing, no button to expand text or anything either. Some bug, they can't even render a textual article even though browsers could do that in 1993.

The simple answer is that this one article received tens of thousands of reads in a day. My other sites, not so much,

If any young entrepreneurs are reading this, one of the few things I'd actually pay for is a web browser that worked like reader mode, but all the time.

This existed and it was called Opera. It had the ability to replace the style sheet on a site with a custom version, one of which was a high contrast reader mode. Opera split into two, and the current version doesn’t have this feature but maybe Vivaldi still does?

Just about every browser has this.

Then what's the problem? Why does parent want to pay for a feature they already have?

What should be used instead?

HN text post. Here the text is sometimes lift gray on light gray background it seems. Much better!

I like you

Why stop using Medium???

Try reading a Medium article on slow internet connection (such as EDGE), then compare with a plain-text article like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/.

Is there a full-featured, usable, free, no-code, no-sysadmin blog platform with performance akin to motherfuckingwebsite.com ?

I haven't used it (I prefer to write my site myself), but perhaps https://bearblog.dev/?

Nice, that does fit the bill!

Note that it does not include custom domains or image uploading on the free plan, but you can upgrade for $29 (lifetime), which gets you:

    Custom domains (this is time-consuming)
    Image uploading (due to the cost of hosting images)
    Email subscriber lists (since it gets complicated)
    Beta features (since they aren't ready yet)
    You can upgrade for $29, flat.

The editing interface is just a textbox where you paste markdown; doesn't seem there's a github integration or anything like that, which is too bad.

Soft paywall for some random guy's blog. Uses 40mb of artisnal javascript to display a basic text document with a few images maybe. Hostile to the open web.

I stopped copying my articles there, some time ago.

I stopped when I posted an article, and Medium decided it was so good, that it deserved a paywall.