IE doesn’t do tabbed windows, keyboard control, or security. Opera does those three, but not proper DOM, so lots of otherwise valid DHTML won’t work and I have to type in all the code for this blog by hand even though IE has got lots of cute little bookmarklets that work with Movable Type. Mozilla I find unspeakably slow to load, and I can never remember whether the next window is going to pop up in a tab or not. But I’ve just discovered a really clever trick.
One of Opera’s nicest features is that you can toggle, with one keystroke, between using your own style sheet for a site, or using the one the designer built. And you can do this on a page-by-page basis, which Mozilla won’t. Because the rules cascade, I can use my CSS to do simple things like eliminating plain white backgrounds without screwing up the rest of the layout.
I just found a brilliant hack to extend this: a stylesheet that blocks ads in CSS. This is much classier than merely toggling all the images off, which Opera has done for years. It only toggles off the images that are banner ad sized. Couple that with the ability to open popup windows only in the background, and Opera has suddenly acquired some quite sophisticated ad-blocking.
proxomitron is your friend.
argh
How about us poor sods who are still trying to scrape a living by online adverts?
Doesn’t matter, I guess: what Opera does is somewhere down there with Tagalog translations on the marketeers’ radar. And if banner ads don’t work then we’ll have to find something else to do in any case…
bloody Darwin.
R
But even us tagalog speaks can’t escape the horrendous interstitial ads on yahoo mailing lists – the ones that were egroups. Their search interface is the most obnoxious, sluggish and ad-filled piece of crap I have ever come across.
What might be interesting to watch is the latest round of AOL vs MSN in which the absence of (pop-up) ads is being used as a draw by AOL.