The Struggling Writer

The chronicles of a freelance writer as he tries to make a living.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Please, please, please stop using Snap!

There is a special place in hell for webmasters who use popups and an even worse place for those who use Flash popups since they exist specifically to bypass popup blocker. One of the new blogging fads is to use Snap to provide flash popup previews of links. In my book this is one of the most annoying things ever invented for the web since it's just popups masquerading as a supposedly useful tool.

The previews are useless since they are too small to read. You still have to click on the link so the popups just waste time and bandwidth. Blogs become minefields where you have to carefully navigate your mouse between links so you don't actually set off an explosion of preview windows.

Thanks to PSA: How to Turn Off Snap Pop-Up I discovered getting rid of them is easy. When you get one of the windows look in the top right corner to see a gear symbol. Click on the gear and then on "Disable" from the dropdown menu. Another dialog will appear asking if you want to disable for all sites or just the current site. Click all sites, then Save. You'll get a message that tells you to reload the current page to turn off Snap and you are done.

The instructions above might be a little off since I already turned off Snap so I can't look at the dialogs to be sure of all the steps. I don't see a way to turn it back on, but why would I want to?

Death to popups!

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