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.
https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/
I haven't personally tried it yet, but I'm tempted.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.