Blocking hover ads

Okay, I am done with hover ads. I am so done with it, I am starting to avoid website which implement them even though I (used to) like those websites.

Obviously, it is considerably harder to block hover ads than it is to block pop-up or pop-under ads. As far as I know, AdBlock does not stop them, so then what?

My question is: how to avoid or block hover ads? Do you know of any tricks to do so?

Solution 1:

In Firefox I have a filter in Adblock plus of *.intellitxt.*

This seems to block them (or it blocks enough so that I have not noticed them).

Solution 2:

If you are using Firefox, then the noscript add-on is an option. Most of these ads are loaded by script and Noscript will block that. Though this will leave you with sites that depend on script for their basic purpose not working in other ways.

Another option (again Firefox only, though there are no doubt ways to do the same in other recent browsers) is aardvark which lets you manually remove the floaters. I find this handy for removing excess content when printing pages too. This is a manual process, but less of a blunt instrument than noscript. There are some places that are getting wise to such DOM manipulation though, specifically those hawking Microsoft's Silverlight - those floaters seem to detect that you have removed when and they replace themselves (as I've never come across anything on such an affected site that I can't get from many others I just add these sites to my "will never visit again" list, enforced by hosts file entry, and move on).

What you are looking for really is something that automatically does what can be done with aardvark without disabling all script. Unfortunately this is a significant problem as there are many ways to arrange floaters so such a tool would have to carry configuration for each site and would need to support a number of methods of removal, so would be much more of a chore to develop and maintain than noscript and aardvark. Writing something (an add-on or some sort of proxy based filter) to automatically detect and deal with floaters would require a level of AI not currently available (or, at least not currently remotely close to being practical to implement for this purpose!) as there are many ways to implement them and all could be mistake for more useful UI elements so false positives would be a noticeable problem.

Update:

Some years later, things have moved on... In modern browsers you don't need add-ons like Aarvark: the built in debugging tools allow you to monkey around with the DOM to remove parts you don't want. In Chrome, Firefoz, and modern ID, right-click and pick "inspect element" to be taken to the DOM explorer form where you can delete or edit elements to your hearts content. I sometimes use this to create printable versions of pages that "reading view" modes don't work well on for that (I don't use it much for irritating pop-overs - when they appear I tend to just close that tab and move on). If you are wary of right-clicking being taken as an action, open the debugging tools by pressing F12 and navigate to the right part of the DOM explorer that way.

Of course this is all very manual and requires some knowledge of HTML, particularly for some complex pages where knowing what to delete/edit and what not can be unclear, so for ad-blocking automated add-ins specific to that and/or the likes of noscript (or just leaving sites that irritate you in that way and never coming back!) are the way to go.

Solution 3:

I recently discovered that in addition to blocking regular ads, uBlock can also block scripts that cause some hover ads. I was able to remove NoScript and now use uBlock for both.

You just need to turn on blocking for 3rd-party scripts. After that some sites might break, NoScript users will be familiar with this. However you can easily whitelist sites by adding them to the My rules tab:

* youtube.com * noop

Blocking mode: medium mode