On 19/03/2006, at 5:04 AM, Brett Carboni in WAMUG Mailing List digest
wrote:
Is there any hack/program/incantation that will stop those ultra
annoying web page animations, similar to something that kills popups?
I'm a supporter of the web advertising sponsor driven model, but the
dancing man in a kilt animation on bigpond has driven me over the
edge. And it's something that I've recently seen more and more, even
on good sites like NYT, to the point where it's hard to read what's
there. Even a floating window that I could drag over it, or better
still something that kills flash.
<http://www.bigpondmovies.com/user/movieList.php?display=recent>
(View at your own risk/annoyance).
Big Pond is a site that I avoid for many other reason too; it had more
click-through rubbish than any site I've been to the last time I had to
go there. Hope it's improving with new management like the Telstra
site seems to be. I even managed to do a phone plan change online in
less time than I would have taken waiting for a phone operator.
For the unwanted animations, there are some few fixes if you get
yourself Firefox and go to the extensions management and "tips and
tricks" for configuration. It depends whether the animations are gif
or flash, but both can be squelched.
There's also ways to stop most scrolling marquee script and to stop
flashing text.
You can choose to have gif animations play only once.
You can even turn off those silly animated headlines on the fairfax
news front pages.
The one extension that many readers use is the "nuke anything" which
allows you to disappear most objects by context clicking on them.
In Camino, even though there isn't the capability for Firefox-style
extensions, you can do the basic flash and moving script blocking and
it has a UI preference for playing gifs only once. I've a couple of
one-off configuration tweaks for the user file that I got from the
support forum. The geeks there are always a mine of info.
I don't block ads, or javascript, but I don't like being made seasick
with all the jerky animation some sites choose to throw at me while I'm
trying to read fixed text.
Their loss if I have to kill the moving stuff.
It's a reflection of the techniques at apple (and one of the big
reasons I wanted to get going with OS X) that their site's animations
have never detracted from my reading comfort. Smooooooth.
Nancy M
