Thank you Kottke (and in turn Gruber) for showing everyone how to disable the ‘Snap Preview’s that have been popping up everywhere.
Update: Jeremy has a good entry summing up some of my own thoughts and providing some stuff I hadn’t seen before as well.
It has no single redeeming feature. The number of times it’s popped up as I’ve gone to click a link which means I end up clicking the sodding Snap Preview link. Fucking thing.
Thank you. I hate those things with a passion.
All hail Kottke.
Interesting. I actually kind of like previewing a link before I click on it. I didn’t realize some people hated those so much.
I’m not exactly sure what Chris meant when he said, “it’s popped up as I’ve gone to click a link which means I end up clicking the sodding Snap Preview link”. In my experience, the preview is offset from the link by a fair amount. I’m not sure how anyone would accidentally click anything other than the intended link?
For those who hate the previews, you don’t need to follow the link above. Anytime you are presented with a snap preview, just click the “options” link in the upper right corner of the preview window. You can disable previews for that site, or for all sites. You don’t need to go to a special webpage to do it.
thank you!
Thank. You.
Snap previews are, well, entirely pointless. If I want to ‘see’ what a link’s page looks like.. I’ll follow the link.
And yes, all hail Kottke (and Heilemann) for pointing out the cure.
Hello,
My name is Jason Fields, I am Product Evangelist for Emerging Technology for Snap.com and Snap Preview Anywhere blog widget. I wanted to address some of the fodder that has been circulating in the blogosphere about the usefulness of our product.
I want to be clear, Snap Preview Anywhere is NOT Adware or p0rn pop-ups as some have said, it’s a simple and almost zero footprint widget to enhance the traditional hyperlink paradigm. Lets face it, up until now, the hyperlink has remained a completely subjective web based entity. If someone makes the link text say ‘click here’ you have to click the link (or look at the URL in your status bar) to gauge whether you want to visit the site or not.
Our product enables you to look before you leap, saving people a wasted click (ex. not being a site you wanted to visit, excessive server load times for the site, site causing the browser to crash, etc). I would argue in fact that it is MUCH more useful than just clicking and wasting time just following a link blindly.
I will however be the first to admit that this is a product that some people don’t like, and I respect their opinions. This is why we have listened to end users feedback and made sure to include a simple method to opt-out of the Snap Preview Anywhere behavior for those who don’t like it.
Another goal of ours is to constantly evolve this product and make it even more useful to end-users. As we receive more and more feedback on the product, we have come to realize that there are other nuggets of nascent data and information that are equally beneficial to people. Once of our initiatives (and there are many in the works now) is to take a look at microformats and how we can support that enhanced markup set with our technology in the near future.
As a footnote, its ironic to post this here, but in some cases now we get feedback from end users that are mad at us due to the fact that they don’t always get a Snap preview bubble on certain sites they visit.
Thanks for your attention.
Jason Fields
Product Evangelist, Emerging Technology
http://www.Snap.com
I like those previews. Whats all the fuss about if you can easily turn them off?
I just added snap to my adblocker blacklist back when they started to appear. Simple solution thats controlled by myself and wont be affected by clearing my cookies out or if snap change policy to ignore the cookies.
Its good to know that snap cares enough that they to provide an official way to keep people sane.
Thank you, I also find these snap things frustrating and irritating – cheers.
But why should we have to turn them off?! They should be opt-in not opt-out!
It’s like being back in the 90s with rubbish like Comet Cursor! No benefit to the user but it ‘looks cool’…
Definitely Annoying.
Even worse is the developer’s attitude. Hopefully they will recognize that the preview effect should be a browser plug-in — a download for users that modifies there browser — rather than a publisher plug-in that forces the effect on all users. It is ridiculous that the end user should have to take steps to disable it.
“Cool effects” like these are what drove users to disable JavaScript in their browser back in the day in hopes of escaping pop-ups, auto window resizing and other annoyances (i.e. norm [warning: this will screw with your browser window]). It resulted in useful DOM scripting being abandoned for several years.
Add me to those who don’t like Snap preview. It should be a user choice (as said earlier a browser plugin) and not the choice of the web designer. I’ve stopped going to a couple of sites that use Snap. It’s just so darn irritating.
After reading this post, I submitted the question, Yay or Nay, about Snap Previews over on my site. I find it fascinating that in the comments of both sites, people have equated Snap Previews to pop-up ads. Why is that? I mean, they’re not really pop-up ads, they’re previews. Is it because they have the Snap logo on them?
As mentioned in an earlier comment, I actually like the previews. I’m a very visual person. For me, seeing a destination may be the deciding factor on if I decide to go there. I find it very interesting that if you follow this story back from Binary Bonsai, to Kottke, to Daring Fireball… you’ll notice that all three of these sites use little to no images in any of their posts. Even Jeremy’s site, that Michael added in his update, uses very few images. Is there some connection between people who hate the previews, and people who don’t use images in their blogs?
Paul
The problem is with browsing. On a link heavy site like TechCrunch, I hate windows popping up on me when I am just reading and the mouse accidentally happens to hover over a link. I have resorting to using just the RSS feed for that site now.
The main thing for me is, that this should be a UA feature, and an opt-in one at that.
Thank you so much!
Oh snap! The nightmare of snap is over!
Hi all. Very interesting thread that I much enjoyed reading. I recently wrote a piece on the subject myself having been very confused whether to use it or not for quite some time.
One thing that hasn’t been brought to light I think is that using SPA greatly hampers users of mobile devices. I use my trusty Sony Ericsson M600i mobile phone to read various websites/blogs to and from work every day and after seeing my own site (using SPA at the time) made my choice simple. Not only does it drastically reduce the usability from a mobile browser standpoint, it also uses precious mobile data transfer (very expensive at least in Sweden).