Wednesday, January 31, 2007

How To Disable Snap Preview Anywhere

Snap Preview Anywhere is a new "feature" on some websites where you move your mouse over a link and a small popup shows up displaying a miniature version of the web page that is linked to.

Apparently I'm not the only person who finds this "feature" incredibly annoying. You would have thought that we had learned this when we roundly rejected popups and pop-unders more than two years ago.

Note to bloggers: be wary of adding a feature to your site which claims to be of use to you ("Previews help you, the site owner, keep the user on your site instead of losing them to the site behind the hyperlink") but does not claim to be of any use to your readers.

Well, you can globally turn this feature off in either of two ways:

The first method is to click the options link in the top-right corner of one of the pop-up bubbles:



You will see an options screen like this:



Select to disable for ALL sites.

This turns off SPA globally for all sites.

Any sites that you have in your cache might still display the bubbles; you will have to reload them to get rid of them.

The other way is to visit the SPA FAQ, also available from the above box, or directly at http://www.snap.com/about/spa_faq.php#2.



Select to disable SPA, and it will be disabled globally.

Either of these two procedures work only if you have cookies enabled, and only for the browser you are using.

Yehuda

2 comments:

gnome said...

At last! Thank you so much Yehuda.

:)

Yehuda Berlinger said...

You're welcome.

Yehuda