| So, how do you block the frames? |
In Mozilla browsers, enter about:config in the address bar, press Enter, then find the following and set it to false:
browser.frames.enabled
I thought IE had an option for frames, but I don't see it now. Though it does have a couple of options to limit functionality in frames.
With IE being nearly impossible to set up securely and Chrome being spyware, I use Pale Moon as my limited browser. (It's just a stripped down version of Firefox.) Then I use Firefox for cases where I must enable 3rd-party images, frames, temporary cookies and possibly script, using NoScript to limit that. K-Meleon is a 3rd option. They recently came out with an update. I installed it but haven't really tried it. And I didn't like that K-Meleon tried to go to these two sites on first start:
216.34.181.96:80 Savvis
52.27.123.81:443 Amazon
Savvis seems to be their site, but still, they have no business calling home. I don't know what the Amazon call was for.
With frames disabled there are a few sites that will be blank because they use a frameset. Thankfully, that method has been out of favor for many years, so it's rare.
| I have a large HOSTS file that block Double Click and lots of other | stuff. For Facebook alone, I have around 40 entries. I think FB is as | dangerous of not more than Google. I keep scripts disabled as much as | possible. It's not just for privacy, but also because I am on dialup. | Disabling all that crap makes webpages load a lot faster. |
Yes. Javascript "libraries" often take up to 1/2 MB these days, despite the page itself being much smaller.
You might want to look into Acrylic. It's small and simple, and lets you use wildcards:
*.doubleclick.net
*.doubleclick.com
Basically it's a local DNS server. Very small. Open source. Your browser calls Acrylic to resolve a URL to an IP address, and Acrylic checks its own HOSTS file before going to the DNS server of your choice. Every once in awhile Acrylic seems to fail to start it's service. Then I have to uninstall it and reinstall it. I don't know why. Aside from that it works well.
| There is an old browser called "Off By One". It will load a page 10X | faster, because it only loads basic HTML and pictures, and little more. | Many sites dont render properly, but if all I want is some text info, I | can usually just read the text and see pictures, and skip the crap. It | dont work on some websites, but it's always worth a try. | | I'd like to find a way to block those .CSS files too, and even more so, | those damn pop-overs. The old popup blockers dont work on them. |
Nothing can pop up without script, although CSS is getting more flexible. I had to add some code to usecontent.css awhile back to stop animated "slideshows" done with CSS and no script. It's tough to skip CSS entirely. Many sites now just display as a jumble without it. But I often find myself going to View -> Style -> No Style on sites because their design is either really bad, with things like gigantic text or faulty CSS, or they've got a panel blocking the view. I still haven't figured that one out, but it seems to be deliberate obfuscation to thwart scripting. The page text will either be blocked or the background color will be similar to text color. Presumably the script fixes it, so the page gets disabled if script is disabled.
Example: 411.com for looking up phone numbers. It used to work fine. Now I just see a giant picture with some links below it. If I click the link for reverse phone or reverse address lookup it comes back to the same page. No input fields. It's useless. Then I set the view to No Style and I can see the various input fields. It seems that the picture is set to cover the page and only gets removed if script is allowed to run.
I really can't tell how much of the problem is spiteful coding to thwart script blockers and how much may just be incompetence combined with gross overuse of both CSS and script. The CSS file on that site is 125 KB! Not long ago that was too big for a webpage. And the amount of layout they actually use could easily fit in about
5 KB. So I wonder if maybe, with many of these sites, there's just nobody in charge and a lot of young interns are just cramming in all the latest hoopla, losing track of what they're doing. No one could seriously keep track of 125 KB worth of CSS for a single webpage.