[auton-users] hiding web ads with stylesheets

[Dan Pelleg]

Here's how to tell Mozilla to eliminate ads from webpages. (I know we all
surf the web strictly for research purposes, but some of these conference
sites can have annoying ads all over them!).

First, find your mozilla preferences directory. In UNIX it's under your
home directory named something like .mozilla/USERNAME/4d9a3ff1/chrome (it
really is the parent of that, but the files discussed here go in the chrome
directory).

Next, download the file http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dpelleg/userContent.css into
that directory. Shut down mozilla and restart it. You're done. For the full
effect compare how http://news.com.com/ and any articles linked from it
look before and after you do this.

More info, tips and tricks:

 - that file is human-readable and modifiable. You can easily refine the
rules in it to better match the sites you visit.

 - it includes a rule to disable shockwave flash, commented out

 - after you change the file you'll need to restart mozilla

 - other CSS-aware browsers should be able to use it as well

 - in http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dpelleg/opacity.css there's a version of it
that still shows the ads, but very faintly. You will need to rename it to
userContent.css after you download it.

 - there is more info at:
   http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/07/21/magazine/css_anarchist.html?page=2
   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html
   (note the file above actually uses a CSS3 selector, which is not
documented here)

 - in theory you should be able to have an @import statement in your
userContent.css so you could download the rule file from the web. This
would allow a single maintainer to keep updating the rules for a group of
people. However for some reason this doesn't work (mozilla doesn't even
seem to try and fetch the URL). If anyone has a solution to that please
tell me.

Also, nothing to do with CSS, but if you haven't done so already, you
should go to preferences/advanced/scripts&plugins and check off some boxes
(try "open unrequested windows" and "move or resize existing windows").

-- 

  Dan Pelleg