Bookmarklets For Annoyances On The Internet

The Internet is full of annoyances. That does not mean that you encounter them on every website you visit, but chance is relatively high that you stumble upon sites regularly that have features that you find annoying.

This starts with pretty basic annoyances, blinking text for instance or background music which are thankfully more or less a thing of the past. It goes one with annoyances that many modern websites have, exit popups, tracking cookies, articles that are split into multiple pages to increase pageviews or links that use a custom color to make them harder to detect.

Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances is a collection of web browser bookmarklets to get rid of specific annoyances. Bookmarklets are small programs that affect (for instance change, add or remove features) the active website when they are executed.

The website lists 20 bookmarklets along with descriptions of what they do and in which browser they can be used in. The website itself appears to be relatively old since it lists Netscape as one of the browsers and not Google Chrome or Safari. Chance is however high that the scripts will work in all modern web browsers.

The bookmarklets need to be dragged and dropped to the browser's bookmark's toolbar or a folder of the bookmarks.

Probably the most interesting from today's point of view are the following bookmarklets:

• zap images - replaces all images on the website with its alternate text.
• printer friendly - tries to find and load a printer friendly version of the page
• restore context menu - re-enables the context menu if a page has blocked access to it
• zap cookies - removes cookies that have been added by the website

I have tested several of the bookmarklets and they all worked flawlessly. Interested users find all 20 over at Squarefree.