OSX Sequoia : Hide Distracting Items

(having installed this morning) Following a link to the Manchester Evening News from a thread I thought I’d have a go at OSX / Safari’s new ‘hide distracting items’ feature for web pages. Annoying pops up and floating ads on the page become a fun game of whack-a-mole and they pop into a little shower of stars and disappear when you click on them.

Would I be right to assume, unlike an adblocker, from the site’s point of view the ads are still being served?

Anyway something to amuse the free members for a while I guess 🙂

Perhaps in 15.0.2 that can add a totaliser and forumites can post their high scores.

had heard about it but not used it yet. Just tried it on that **** saracen ad on the front page which apparently is not an ad. kaboooooom!! awesome 🙂

it’s kind of like a 90s techno-thriller film where a computer gets a virus and stuff just starts vaporising off the screen :):):)

I was going to say that I can do it on my phone too, but it seems to have disappeared with the 18.0.1 update?
There’s now just an option to turn off content blockers.

Oh, it’s still there on other sites but not on here?

Oh, it’s still there on other sites but not on here?

works for me on here but I’m running 18.1b6 at the moment!

I was going to say that I can do it on my phone too

Ah – im still on 17 something-or-other

Would I be right to assume, unlike an adblocker, from the site’s point of view the ads are still being served?

Is it a built in feature of the Safari browser, not an extension or third party app?  If so, I can’t see the issue.  Especially as a feature to hide “distracting items” isn’t necessarily focused solely on adverts, It sounds great if it works, can I run Safari on a Chromebook and Android phone?

I’d really like to zap these half rendered psychedelic side banners!  The very definition of “distracting items”!

There’s a plugin for Chrome called consent-o-matic which does something similar.  You tell it what you do and don’t agree to, then it does all the cookie consent clicking for you.  I’ve been using it for a couple of months and it’s showing nearly 3,000 clicks saved.  It’s my new favourite thing.

can I run Safari on a Chromebook and Android phone?

You can but Opera is a better mobile browser as it has proper text reflow, and it comes with a built in ad-blocker which is mostly quite effective.

Thanks both.  Cougar, that sounds like a great option.  I’ll take a look.

There’s a plugin for Chrome called consent-o-matic which does something similar

yes but does it make things burst into stars?

im a recent convert to Wordiply so seeing a little star burst makes me feel incredibly clever.

Was curious about this – including a ad blocker with the built in browser on macos/iOS would surely be a bit counter intuitive given apple make money through ads.

And sure enough, it’s only designed for static content so not really suitable for ads.

works well and on iOS as well. doesn’t make anything here load quicker. this is the slowest loading website I visit by a large margin…

yes but does it make things burst into stars?

You can have it show a mini-animation of what it’s doing, which is oddly satisfying.

I love it. I haven’t used it for ads, but it works for pop-ups.

I am finally getting rid of those ‘sign in with google..’ boxes, and I can read The Guardian without getting the ‘While you’re here …’ rubbish.

I just went to try it on MSN, which I believe has more distractions than anywhere else I’ve looked. I clicked ‘Hide distracting items’, moved the cursor over the page, and the entire page was suggested as a distraction! Apple are wiser than we realise.

apple make money through ads.

only on the App Store not really on web. That’s why they turn off 3rd party cookies and introduced app tracking transparency – good for privacy plus mostly hurts meta and Google.

There’s a plugin for Chrome called consent-o-matic which does something similar.  You tell it what you do and don’t agree to, then it does all the cookie consent clicking for you.

There’s a similar utility for iOS and MacOS called superagent. Costs a couple of quid but well worth it for those cookie consents that take the pee with hidden ‘reject all’ functions.