and I'm sure it seemed like such a good idea, too.

[waider]

Those snapshot things appearing on livejournal links wouldn't be so bad if they were click-to-load. The fact that they pop up on mouse-over is pretty much unbearable when my wimpy laptop is any way busy. So, DIE DIE DIE.

Comments

[wisn.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't even mind them working on mouseover, as long as there was a deliberate latency so that simply moving the mouse across the screen wouldn't trigger a cascade of momentarily bandwidth-jamming triggers that occasionally wedge the browser until it finishes executing the applets. Even a fraction of a second would be adequate.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Or, oh yeah, they could provide a user setting to turn it off globally. Why can't they do that? Compared to having implemented this thing in the first place, IT'S NOT HARD.

[waider.livejournal.com]

They do.

Go to Manage Settings and uncheck the "Graphical Preview" box.

I think there's also a cookie you can set to disable snap Internet-wide.

And probably a greasemonkey doodad.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmm no. That only affects preview action within your own journal. Effective if you never read anything but your own journal and friends list, useless outside your sandbox.

FAQ #277 tells you how to turn it off globally. If you'd already turned it off locally it means having to browse other folks' LJs until you find an offsite link. Which is weird and awkward but, hey, you only have to do it once.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

And hey, the user settings allow you to set a long preview delay, exactly what I was griping about. I'll try that before I nuke it completely. Of course, you have to go through this for every browser you use, but that's a small price for an arbitrarily-imposed inconvenience.

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Dunno about greasemonkey, but the FF extension NoScript will disable it.

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

I have to confess that I'm vaguely reassured to learn that other people are getting pissed off by them, too.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Privoxy blocks them, as well as most other crap I don't want to see, and the nice thing is that it doesn't even have to be running on the 8 year old laptop I'm using to post this; it just has to be running somewhere on the local subnet, where I can point to it as a web proxy.