27 Jul 06 A Firefox Extension Unfulfilled

EDIT: Believe it or not, the extension described below got built! I wrote up and described the idea on the Extensions Mirror, and the idea got picked up and created by Erik van Kempen, who was behind the ExtendFirefox developer contest. It now exists as BlockSite.

EDIT #2: Hey, Lifehackers! Stick around and check out the site if y’like. My geekery tag both here and on del.icio.us probably may contain items of interest … In case you’re curious, this all got started when I decided I didn’t want to use or contribute to Wikipedia any longer. I wrote a little how-to on how to minimize its effect on your web experience, but realized that people still commonly linked to it, meaning i would keep stumbling across it repeatedly. And AdBlock Plus’ element hiding feature was destructive to pages’ appearance in that it would remove the link entire, including the link text. Thus, the entreaty below and on the Extensions Mirror was born …

Something I’ve suggested Lifehacker ask its audience, and I’ll go ahead and put it here (and ping the LazyWeb, too) …

I’d love to see a Firefox extension that enables you to remove a website from your online existence. This wouldn’t be aimed towards parental controls, but more towards those time- and productivity-leeching websites that we all have tons of, or, alternatively, a website you’re just seeking to remove from your life. (Three guesses as to what prompted this latest round of thinking, and the first two don’t count.)

This extension I’m visualizing would perform two functions: first, it would prohibit direct attempts to visit the website in question (not just the main page, but also any subpages on the site in question). The other, useful function would be that it would rewrite the HTML of other webpages to remove links to that site — for example, if this was in the HTML of, say, Google News:

I never want to visit <A HREF=”http://www.siteiwanttoavoid.com”>this site</A> again.

The extension would rewrite that to say:

I never want to visit this site again.

Thus removing the hyperlink to the site.

In this way, not only do you never visit the site again, but you never need worry about clicking on a link to the site again.

I’m aware of a few ways to sort of do the first of the two functions — you can modify your hosts file (which doesn’t work for the Portable Firefox install I carry around for use “on the road”), and there’s the Invisibility Cloak script which, when slightly edited, can just permanently block a site once it’s been entered in. For some reason, the “site blocking” function apparently was removed from AdBlock Plus; I’m told it was in AdBlock Plus 0.5ish, but disappeared shortly thereafter. I can’t imagine why someone would do that …

And as for the second function, AdBlock Plus can strip links to a website altogether — but unfortunately, that also removes the accompanying text. So in the above example, AdBlock Plus would render that as:

I never want to visit again.

So …

It’s pretty hard nowadays to find a useful function for which a Firefox extension has not been written — and this appears to be one of them. Unfortunately, I ain’t a programmer. Too bad, because I’d love this ability!

Programmers, on your marks …