Comments on: my yahoo upgrade? Google home page, thanks.

By: John

John — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:12:01 +0000

I just read this over a year after it was posted and I have to say that bbum’s point was entirely correct. Of course you can use any number of methods to alter the content of websites (greasemonkey, CSS and so on), but the point is that yahoo’s new design is atrocious. The simple economics of the internet are that people gravitate towards the easiest to use websites and not the ones which are so poorly designed that they only become usable after the user has spent twenty minutes redesigning them. The reason we use yahoo, google, msn or, indeed, virtually any commercial product, is that we want somebody to have designed and implemented the product for us. The fact that you can change it doesn’t present any defence for the original design – no more than a hideous sweater is somehow more acceptable once you realise that you can dye it, cut bits off and restyle it.

By: bbum

bbum — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:56:08 +0000

Fine for you and me. I fracking hate CSS though and could really think of not much more torturous than trying to explain how to install such a fix to my Mom or Sister.

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:49:06 +0000

Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure? I keep telling people, the whole POINT of the web was that the users would be in control of the presentation layer. You have the right to reformat and refigure incoming web pages any way you like. If you want to use Greasemonkey or CSS to eliminate certain specific elements, that is just what a web browser was designed to allow. You are no longer required to allow commercial websites to shove advertising down your throat.

By: bbum (waiting for panic'd machine to reboot)

bbum (waiting for panic'd machine to reboot) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:28:31 +0000

Neat hack, but still a pain in the ass. I don’t want to have to install or maintain it across multiple machines. Nor does it excuse Yahoo’s crappy design. I shouldn’t have to work around bad design decisions just to make something usable!

For now, Google is proving to be far superior for my uses and I don’t have to hack to make it usable.

By: Charles

Charles — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:09:14 +0000

Well, in that case, you could easily eliminate the offending ads using a custom CSS stylesheet, I first learned this trick from floppymoose.com although this technique is not as popular anymore since real adblock software has become widespread. You’re unlikely to get more official support than CSS, it’s certainly less intrusive than SIMBL.

By: bbum

bbum — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:46:06 +0000

I have used Pith Helmet in the past, but I can’t use it on most of my machines as they are running stuff that cannot be perturbed by unsupported plugins.

By: Charles

Charles — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:07:17 +0000

Get an ad blocker, I use Safari with PithHelment and I don’t see the ad. Well yeah, there’s one line of text advertising, but the box collapses and takes very little vertical real estate.