How to Hide Annoying Things on Mobile Sites Using 1Blocker
You are browsing the Internet on your iPhone when you see a pop-up asking you to subscribe to the newsletter. Are you: A) frantically looking for a little X to make it disappear, B) roll your eyes and hit the back button to leave, or C) want to get rid of those annoying pop-ups while continuing to read your favorite passages. 1Blocker , our favorite ad blocker on iOS , just introduced a feature that makes Option C much easier.
The new 1Blocker feature is essentially a visual blocker similar to what you’ll find in a desktop ad blocking tool. You can individually select certain elements on the page and hide them. This means you can hide anything that annoys you on a particular site, including certain types of ads, annoying sponsored stories, or the aforementioned newsletter pop-ups. It’s a great tool because it means you can actually customize the look and feel of your site, but still keep the sites you like without deleting all of your ads. To do this, you need 1Blocker premium.
Let’s take the above example from Packed Party , which does an insanely annoying thing on the mobile web when a mailing list sign-up window pops up after you’ve been idle for a while. Removing this is easy:
- In Safari, click the Share button, then click 1Blocker (you may need to scroll to More to enable it if you haven’t already).
- Tap Hide Page Element and wait for the page to reload.
- Click on what you want to disappear. In this case, it is a newsletter pop-up window. Then click Save and then Return to Safari and you will see the site reload without this item.
This makes it easy to customize certain websites without completely blocking any ads or other annoying factors on their site. You can do this with a variety of elements besides pop-ups and ads. Let’s take Packed Party again as an example to get rid of those awkwardly located social media buttons.
- In Safari, tap the Share button, then tap 1Blocker.
- Tap Hide Page Element.
- Tap one of the social buttons, such as Twitter or Pinterest, on the side. In many cases this will only select one of these little buttons at a time, but you can click the Expand button at the bottom of the screen to select them all at once. You can also click the “Narrow” button if the selection is too large.
- When you’re done, click Save and then Return to Safari to reload the page (you can also click Hide Another Item to continue adding new rules).
Generally, this kind of thing tends to hide elements a little weird, but in my experience it works most of the time. I found this incredibly useful as I usually don’t want to use ad blocking all the time, but there is so much annoyance on the mobile web that it is often frustrating to use without blocking every ad. Besides the two examples above, you can also use it to block those stupid chat popups that started showing up a year or two ago and I’m pretty sure no one has ever intentionally used, promoted story sections, or those weird “you might also like »Blocks, which are usually just advertisements for extremely dubious looking sites.
Obviously, you’ll only bother doing this for the select sites you visit on a daily basis, but it’s worth the extra effort to make the site less awful without completely shutting off their revenue streams.