bobbyblue's blog

Have you ever visited a website and wished you could completely remove some annoying aspect of the site, such as an annoying image or a giant header, etc? Well if there’s any element of a webpage you want to hide permanently, you can do so using a Firefox add-on!

RIP, aka Remove It Permanently, can remove just about any HTML element from a webpage, including image, forms, headers, tables, flash content, videos, ads, and lots more.

So you can read the New York Times without the New York Times header across the top!

Now take a look at the New York Times web page without the top header:

Pretty sweet eh! Any other items you think clutter up the display of a web page or mess with the flow of the site? Well simple remove it using RIP! So how do you use it?

Well first go ahead and install it in Firefox and then restart Firefox. If you are using Firefox 3, the plugin will not install because it has not been updated. However, you can fix that by adding an entry into the Firefox configuration that ignores the compatibility check.

Open a new tab in Firefox and type in about:config. You’ll get a warning, just click I’ll be careful, I promise!

Now right click in anywhere in the white space and choose New and then Boolean.

Name the new config variable extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Now restart Firefox and install the plugin. Now when you right click anywhere on a web page, two options appear, Remove This Permanently and RIP Advanced.

The first option will remove an item from only the current page. So if you remove the New York Times header off the front page by choosing Remove This Permanently, it will still show up on other pages. To remove something from all pages for an entire domain, you would go to RIP Advanced and choose from Remove From All Similar Pages, Remove From This Website, or Remove From This Domain.

Once you select the option, right click on the element again and choose Remove This Permanently. You can also remove similar items, the parent item, or all parent items. Finally, you can remove all IFrames or Google AdSense.

The only trouble removing items comes when trying to remove Flash items. When you right-click on a Flash box, a different menu appears and you can’t remove it. The only way to remove Flash is to click somewhere right next to it and remove that item. So if the Flash is within a DIV or in a table row element, you would need to remove that in order to remove the Flash.

Also, if you remove too much and the website no longer loads correctly (as I did with the New York Times!), don’t worry! Just right-click and go to RIP Advanced and choose RIP Options.

You’ll see a list of web sites on the left hand side. Click on that site and a list of “RIPS” will appear that are currently being applied to the site. Simply click on them and choose Remove XPath.

Just remove them all and start over until you get it right! Have fun with removing items from your favorite web pages. But before you decide to remove AdSense ads for everyone’s site, I would ask that you take into consideration that it is my income and it’s what pays for my work! I know those ads can be annoying, but it’s the only reason why there is so much free stuff on the web. Enjoy! Source: Ghacks