Kill irritating web page elements in Safari

25 May 2017, 07:46

The history of the web has sadly been a history of irritations. Even now web designers don’t know better than to place irritations in the way of content. Sometimes these are adverts. Sometimes they’re social widgets. Sometimes they’re just things the web designer thought were a good idea.

Here’s how to get rid of them on-demand if you’re using Safari.

1. Head over to the QuickNuke website and download the extension. Once it’s downloaded to your Downloads folder, click on it.
2. You’ll be asked if you want to Trust the extension. Click to do so.
3. Within Safari’s extensions preferences panel, which you’ll now see, click in the box alongside Hotkey Is ⌘⌥ and type K. You can then close the Preferences dialog box.

From now on, whenever there’s an annoying page element that you want to get rid of, tap the Cmd+Option (Alt)+K key combination. As you move the mouse cursor around you’ll see a pink box surround on-screen items. The aim is to move the cursor so that the item you want to remove is surrounded by this pink box. Sometimes moving the cursor a nudge can extend an existing box, so try various positions. Once you’ve found the correct box, click the mouse button. The item will disappear.

Notably, you must hit the Esc key to turn off QuickNuke – unless you want to get rid of other on-page elements, that is.

The page element you got rid of will return when you refresh or revisit the page, so isn’t gone permanently. You’ll have to kill it each time, because QuickNuke doesn’t remember what you opt to get rid of.

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