Is there a way to suppress the Splash ads that appear on webpages? Increasingly almost every web page I launch displays a Splash ad that requires me to either find the “X’ to cancel or Refresh the page to make it go away.
It is a cheap way for advertisers to demand attention but is an annoying user experience.
I am not interested in anything these ads are promoting.
Not sure what you mean, I don’t see them, I see very few ads but I do tend to be maybe on the extreme side when it comes to blocking.
I use Firefox with the uBlock Origin extension, use Little Snitch to block unknown connections, use no social media. Every site that asks for permission to track, I deny as much as possible in their (supposedly honored) options. That level of effort may not be for you but those are some options.
Hard to say it if would work, but if you have a VPN service, maybe try connecting thru somewhere in the EU for a week and see if protections offered there improve your browsing experience.
[Edited to add: there are Browsers (Orion for one) and probably extensions that allow the user to block specific page elements from loading. Maybe worth searching for]
We had a long discussion aboout ad blockers in 2025 where you’ll find a lot of suggestions to solve your problem.
Not sure if this has caught on, but one term for this popup is “dickover”. See: Daring Fireball: What Is a Dickover?
I share your frustration with these user-hostile web sites, but I find that about half the time, refreshing the page does not make them go away. (Another technique to send them away is to click in the page but away from the splash (or dickover), but this works less than half the time.)
I just thought of one more thing, Reader View. It’s in Firefox, also present in Orion, but I haven’t used Safari in a long time, maybe it has it too.
Click on the icon for it (or type the shortcut if it has one) and you get pretty much text centered in the browser window, though results vary. In some browsers you can indicate what domains should always appear in Reader view. Sometimes images and comments are there, sometimes not. Some sites plop up text that indicates they are configured to not show Reader view. Usually ads and other overlays disappear though.
In Safari, you can sometimes remove splash ads using the Hide Distracting Items feature. It’s very satisfying; you point it at something and it obliterates it.
But since it’s a very blunt tool, using it risks leaving a webpage in an unusable state. Sometimes the page is structured in such a way that obliterating the offending ad (or chat dialog, or “dickover,”) also blocks access to the content. (If that happens, you can reverse it easily enough by clicking on the eye-con in the location bar.)
Daring Fireball has an article today on using a Safari extension to turn off JavaSript for specific websites in order to remove dickers (the pop-ups that block page content).
An article from several years ago points to a related issue: the annoying headers and footers that stick to the page. There’s a bookmarklet to deal with the issue:
Ironically, it doesn’t work properly for me on this site. It will suppress the editing/posting panel, but it won’t remove the sticky header (which I would be after).
The only Splash ads I see are from AdBlock Plus, which tell me how many ads their app has blocked. It always seems to pop up at a bad time - when I’m waiting for a page I wanted to see, and the way it pops up has gotten me so annoyed that I have stopped paying them. From that experience, I suspect Splash ads come from something you bought and you might want to drop.
Which site?
Sticky headers have evolved to be resistant to that bookmarklet. There are newer variants floating around the net. I use this one:
javascript:(function()%7Bdocument.querySelectorAll(%22body%20*%22).forEach(function(node)%7Bif(%5B%22fixed%22%2C%22sticky%22%5D.includes(getComputedStyle(node).position))%7Bnode.parentNode.removeChild(node)%7D%7D)%3Bdocument.querySelectorAll(%22html%20*%22).forEach(function(node)%7Bvar%20s%3DgetComputedStyle(node)%3Bif(%22hidden%22%3D%3D%3Ds%5B%22overflow%22%5D)%7Bnode.style%5B%22overflow%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7Dif(%22hidden%22%3D%3D%3Ds%5B%22overflow-x%22%5D)%7Bnode.style%5B%22overflow-x%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7Dif(%22hidden%22%3D%3D%3Ds%5B%22overflow-y%22%5D)%7Bnode.style%5B%22overflow-y%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7D%7D)%3Bvar%20htmlNode%3Ddocument.querySelector(%22html%22)%3BhtmlNode.style%5B%22overflow%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%3BhtmlNode.style%5B%22overflow-x%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%3BhtmlNode.style%5B%22overflow-y%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7D)()%3B%0A
I don’t remember where I found it, but it seems to work a bit better than the original. It does seem to work on the TidBITS Talk site, killing the sticky header but also the comment/edit footer and also the icons to the left of posts.
EDIT: credit where due:
I have been using this for years [mostly] successfully. I found that it did not remove all stickies and I found another. Between the two, I can get rid of just about all of them. Unfortunately, I cannot find a clean text version on my computer nor a web link, but I was able to copy the script from my Safari bookmarks:
javascript:(function%20()%20{%20var%20i,%20elements%20=%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*');%20%20for%20(i%20=%200;%20i%20<%20elements.length;%20i++)%20{%20if%20(["sticky",%20"fixed"].includes(getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position))%20{%20elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);%20}%20}%20})();
The linked version does not work on this site but the version just above does work.
javascript:(function () {
var i,
elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');
for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
if (["sticky", "fixed"].includes(
getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position
)) {
elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);
}
}
})();
This one. TidBITS Talk.
Thank you, Neil and David. It turns out that I am using this variant:
javascript:(function()%7Bdocument.querySelectorAll(%22body%20*%22).forEach(function(node)%7Bif(%5B%22fixed%22%2C%22sticky%22%5D.includes(getComputedStyle(node).position))%7Bnode.parentNode.removeChild(node)%7D%7D)%3Bdocument.querySelectorAll(%22html%20*%22).forEach(function(node)%7Bvar%20s%3DgetComputedStyle(node)%3Bif(%22hidden%22%3D%3D%3Ds%5B%22overflow%22%5D)%7Bnode.style%5B%22overflow%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7Dif(%22hidden%22%3D%3D%3Ds%5B%22overflow-x%22%5D)%7Bnode.style%5B%22overflow-x%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7Dif(%22hidden%22%3D%3D%3Ds%5B%22overflow-y%22%5D)%7Bnode.style%5B%22overflow-y%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7D%7D)%3Bvar%20htmlNode%3Ddocument.querySelector(%22html%22)%3BhtmlNode.style%5B%22overflow%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%3BhtmlNode.style%5B%22overflow-x%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%3BhtmlNode.style%5B%22overflow-y%22%5D%3D%22visible%22%7D)()%3B%0A
I don’t know where I got it, but it does work with Tidbits Talk.
If you are seeing these huge ads on a web site that you often go to you can use StopTheMadness Pro to specify that they should be blocked. If you already have StopTheMadness Pro move your pointer onto the offending graphic and press CMD-delete. I just did it on a web site and had to go through the process four times because there were four different elements that StopTheMadness identified and asked one at a time if I wanted to block them. It can block many other obnoxious elements on web sites, but it’s not strictly an ad blocker. StopTheMadness has been mentioned several times in TidBITS discussions, such as this one.
I’m not sure what sticky headers are being complained about.
There is a small header here on TBT that stays in place as I scroll the topic and I find it useful. Some other sites I’ve been to recently, for software documentation, have header and sometimes sidebars that remain as the middle part scrolls. This is useful as often there is a sort of table of contents on the left and links for the current section on the right.
I find these page elements useful when they have useful tools/icons, and when they provide a concept of where one is within the content. Sometimes the headers shrink as the page is scrolled.
Or are the headers y’all are writing about something else?
In a half-century of software design, two of the most difficult and important lessons I have learned are…
Seems obvious, but I guess I’m kind of slow. Still, I have probably browsed only 0.00001%[1] of web sites, and that’s enough to know that most web “designers” (triflers?) don’t seem to think through their interfaces much. “It works on my machine…” – and on my setup, and with my working style, and with my set of physical and cognitive abilities – seems to be the primary design guideline. Or maybe, “if it demos well, ship it.”
In addition to just-plain-poor-design, there are dickovers implemented as sticky headers, ads implemented as sticky headers, my personal favorite: sticky videos, appeals for donations, appeals for subscriptions/signups, reminders that “you’re read three free articles” already this century.
People use different size screens. People with vision impairment use larger typefaces. Some people cannot devote their entire display to their browser window (it surprises me how many expensive, high-end web sites like my former bank’s still assume a Windows-style “the browser window is always zoomed to full screen” layout, placing elements based on the display dimensions and not the window dimensions).
I don’t find the TidBITS Talk fixed header intrusive, but I’ve certainly seen sites that seem designed to be aggravating. (And when was it that the advertising industry decided that the best way to sell product was to maximally annoy potential customers?) Equally, I’m sure that there are some people whose system setup is such that TBT is easier to browse with the header removed.
I have seen sites where, without removing fixed elements, only two or three lines of the text (the presumed reason for the site’s existence) were visible at one time.
So I have found reader views and fixed-element killers to be a profound help in my daily web browsing, in spite of my excellent eyesight and my two-large-displays-and-a-laptop-screen setup.
always remembering that 86.42% of statistics are made up on the spot ↩︎
So true. I often see splash screens that are even larger than the dimensions of my laptop’s display, have no scroll controls or resizing elements, and have the action buttons (OK/cancel) below the bottom of the screen. I wonder what people who don’t know about keyboard commands for “Back” or “Zoom Out” end up doing, aside from quitting or rebooting.
FWIW, I’m not a fan of the fixed header, but I can live with it. I often read websites using the space bar to scroll down one screen at a time. Unfortunately, when there are fixed/floating headers, the first few lines of a scrolled screen disappear behind the header, so I end up back-scrolling with the arrow keys. Not the end of the world, but it is annoying.
Cool!
I suppose I’m not browsing ‘right’. I rarely come across splash ads or headers that distract from the site contents. When I see one of these ‘let us track you or subscribe’ boxes blocking the content, I too try reader view/mode and most of the time it works: I see the page content without the ads or distractions (maybe it still tracks me somehow). If it results in a page that doesn’t include the content, I just ‘oh well’ and move on to something else.
I find it sad that others have this struggle…