At least one of the extensions mentioned in the guide, Aardvark, has not been updated in recent times. The last update dates back to February 2010 which more or less means that the extension is no longer actively developed. Some users have noticed incompatibilities with recent versions of the Firefox web browser.

That’s the main reason that Hack The Web was created. The Firefox add-on offers a similar functionality as Aardvark. Firefox users can use the extension to remove page elements from the active website.

Whenever you want to print a page you can right-click on the page and select to start Hack the Web.

You will notice then that you page elements are highlighted with a red border when you move the mouse cursor over them.

If you click the left mouse button the element will be removed. You can alternative press the r key to do the same. If you have deleted a page element by accident you can get it back by pressing u for undo. Other keys of interest are w for making the element wider, n for narrower, d for removing the width limit of the element, l for turning the background color to white, b for black on white text and I for removing everything but the selected element. The q key ends the editing mode.

Please note that all page elements will reappear if you reload the page or click on a link to open another page.

The extension offers several advanced commands that include adding global JavaScript variables, pasting a removed element in another location on the page or killing the selected element permanently which only works if the Remove it Permanently extension is installed.

Once you are done editing you can print the remaining elements of the web page on the printer. Removing elements saves printer ink and maybe even paper.

Firefox users can download and install the Hack The Web extension from the official Firefox Add-on repository.

The service works by pointing it to an url on the Internet. The website will be loaded by Print What You Like with controls to manage elements on the website in a left sidebar.

The mouse cursor will automatically highlight elements on the website. These elements can then be manipulated in the sidebar. It is for instance possible to remove elements from the website, change the text font and size, fit elements to the width of the page or resize elements.

Print What You Like offers an automatic option as well which works well on some websites but not on all. This option in theory removes all unnecessary elements from the website.

The service is also offering a bookmarklet that sends urls directly to it making the process more user friendly. Alternatives to Print What You like are The Printliminator bookmarklet, Print Friendly or Green Print.

The Printliminator bookmarklet offers an easy way of removing elements from a website before printing it. The bookmarklet needs to be executed while the website is active. It will display some controls in the upper right corner of the screen. The main controls on the other hand are available with the mouse. Elements on the page will be marked with a red rectangle by moving the mouse around.

Website before optimization for print:

Website after optimization to save printer ink:

A click with the left mouse button will remove the active red rectangle from the website. This includes all elements that are contained in the rectangle at that time. The rectangle will be removed and if that clears a row in the page the remaining content will be moved up. It usually takes a few seconds to remove all elements on the website that are not needed for the print out. This can save a lot of printer ink especially if print outs are generated on a regular basis.

The controls in the upper right corner can be used to instantly remove all graphics from the page, to undo the last action, send the website to the printer or apply a printing stylesheet which will remove some elements and maximize the text to the web browser window. Printliminator should work in all web browsers that support bookmarklets.

Print Friendly is a web based service that is available on their main website, as a bookmarklet and for website owners as a script to put on their websites directly. Print Friendly will basically remove certain elements like advertisement by default from the website. By doing this it reduces the printer ink needed to print the website. More important than that is probably the option to remove additional elements before sending the rest of the document to the printer.

This makes it possible to remove additional unwanted elements such as tags or images from the document before printing it. Print Friendly offers an option to automatically remove all images from the document to make things easier if a document contains many of them. It also features an undo function in case the user wants to go back to a previous state.

The optimized document can then be printed or turned into a pdf at the Print Friendly website. The bookmarklet makes it easier to use the service while surfing the Internet as it will automatically load the active website in the Print Friendly website.

Print Friendly might come handy in situations where other tools or extensions that can remove elements from websites before printing are not available.

A better way to print websites is to remove all unnecessary elements from that website before you send it to your printer. This can be easily done with two Firefox extensions that I reviewed. Elements are everything that is displayed on a website. This can be images, menus, background colors, advertisement and all text.

Most of the time the text and probably the images related to that text are important which means it is safe to remove everything else on that page. Both Firefox extensions – Nuke Anything Enhanced and Aardvark – can remove elements on a website to prepare it for printing.

Aardvark offers several additional functions that I will talk about later. Lets take a look at one of the pages at Ghacks and how it looks like if you print it if you do not remove any elements on that page.

All elements such as advertisements, the top and left menu, title, tags and so on are visible and will also be visible on the printout. Not a nice printout if you only want the text and title of the article.

Nuke Anything Enhanced:

The same article after removing all possible elements with Nuke Anything enhanced. As you can see all menus and adds have been removed from the article leaving only the text, title and images in place. The place however is exactly the same position as before which means that the whitespace where the ads have been is not used and leaves a large white area on the printout.

Aardvark:

This one removes the same elements that Nuke Anything Enhanced has removed with the difference that the text uses the whitespace from the ads that have been removed. This is of course a far better result and will lead to a better – more readable – printout.

It was also easier to remove the elements with Aardvark because it was visually showing a red square around the selected element making it easier to decided whether to remove that element or not.

Conclusion:

The best way to print websites is to use Firefox with the Aardvark extension. If you do print a lot you should definitely consider installing that extension.

Read More:

Aardvark Extension
Nuke Anything Enhanced Extension