By Jason Snell
April 26, 2023 1:53 PM PT
I really don’t want to read the comments
For my own mental health, I haven’t read the comments on most websites in years (and don’t offer them here). Various Safari extensions, including dedicated ones like Shut Up as well as ad blockers like 1Blocker, will give you the option to also hide comments.
Alas, a few sites I read have begun injecting “top comments” into their story text lately. I hate it.
Fortunately, there are several ways to suppress specific kinds of content via Safari extensions these days.
First, to diagnose the problem, I control-clicked on the header of the “top comment” and choose Inspect Element, bringing up Safari’s inspector interface. There is apparently a div in the webpage called top-comment. That’s what I want to kill.
In 1Blocker, I can just use the Hide Elements section in the Custom tab to block .top-comment. (I’ve also got a seasonal 1Blocker rule to hide the Daring Fireball banner when the Yankees are in the playoffs.)
Another good utility for controlling your Safari browsing experience is StopTheMadness, which in addition to many other features, offers CSS-based content blocking. In StopTheMadness, I have to craft a CSS rule that attacks specific CSS styles, in this case .top-comment as well as .crowdsignal-poll-wrapper, because while I’m at it I might as well also block this network’s collection of in-story polls.
You have to wrap the whole thing in proper CSS syntax — the key thing to remember is display: none — but it also does the job.)
Alternately, you could use a Safari extension like PageExtender, which lets you apply custom JavaScript and CSS to individual websites. It’ll do the job, but it’s a more manual interface—you have to create CSS files and save them in a special folder on disk.
My larger point is, if there’s something on the Web that annoys you—and maybe only you!—you can probably find a way to turn it off with a Safari extension. And these days, Safari extensions generally work across Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so if you can block something in one place you can probably block it everywhere.
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