Saturday, November 29, 2014

chromium - How to stop web site navigation hover pop-ups in browser

I've run into an annoying type of pop-up and can't figure out how to suppress it. The problem is links at certain sites related to web site navigation that activate when you hover on them. It happens with all browsers. I don't recall this behavior previously, but I'm suddenly running into it with multiple browsers and multiple sites.



The amazon.com and walmart.com sites are at least two where I'm running into this. On both, there is a row of shopping "helper" links (circled in the pictures below), near the top of product pages. These are site navigation menus. If you click on one of those links, it takes you to a dedicated page.



But there's a hover "feature". If you hover the mouse over most of these links, it pops up a window with a menu of links, an abbreviated version of the "click-on" page. That window covers a large portion of the screen, and remains displayed as long as the mouse is over any portion of the pop-up window. There are other similar "hover booby traps" scattered throughout the page.



The Problem




The problem is that there is no hover delay, so merely passing over one of these links is treated as a hover. Accidentally passing over anything in this mine field suddenly obscures the page with a giant navigation menu (or other content), that continues to block the page until the mouse cursor is moved outside of that window. Even worse, I sometimes find myself on a new page related to some garbage in the pop-up window.



My main browser is Firefox (V62), but I've replicated it with Chromium and Vivaldi, in both Windows 7 and Linux, as well as Internet Explorer in Windows. Daniel B commented that he also replicated it with Edge. (Earlier, it appeared that the Microsoft browsers behaved differently, but that turns out not to be the case.)



Questions:




  • Can the pop-up mechanism that is employed be easily determined from the web page source code for the example links provided below?

  • Is there a way to suppress this action in Firefox or a Chromium-based browser?




Update



@Kinnectus commented that Javascript is likely used to show/hide the "pop-up" content. I disabled Javascript on those pages and that is the mechanism. Unfortunately disabling Javascript also kills other important functionality on the page. So the mechanism has been confirmed, but any solution would need to be more surgical than disabling Javascript.










How to reproduce



I've discovered that reproducing the problem isn't as straightforward as I thought. The web sites appear to tailor the content based on your prior history on the site, whether you're logged into the site, and even the route used to navigate to the product page (likely the source of earlier confusion in replicating the symptoms).



I'll provide a specific link for each site as an example, but the variation may limit some reader's ability to answer. For example, I tested the direct links below on my wife's computer and got different page features before noticing that the site had "remembered" her, and automatically logged her in. The screens changed when I logged her out.



Here is a product page at walmart.com, with the shopping helper row circled:



enter image description here




Hovering or passing over one of the circled links:



enter image description here



Here is a product page at amazon.com with the shopping helper row circled:



enter image description here



Hovering or passing over one of the circled links:




enter image description here



On all product pages at Amazon, regardless of route, the Account & Lists link in the upper right exhibits the hover action, but I can't be sure it is the same mechanism.









Research




Researching this, I haven't found online discussion about this problem with navigation menus (but it does seem to be very recent, which may also be indicated by the fact that going to a product page via an old bookmark or history link often doesn't exhibit the symptom, but getting to the same page via a fresh search does). There is, however, discussion related to pop-ups of other kinds, with solutions such as:




  • Changing the mouse characteristics, like MouseHoverTime. However, I don't want to degrade performance on legitimate hover options, like tooltips. Even if that is actually a solution, MouseHoverTime is a Windows registry setting, and I'm not aware of an equivalent setting in Linux.

  • Blocking pop-ups. These are part of the site navigation, and not the kind of thing blockers focus on. I have the highest-rated pop-up and ad blockers installed and they don't affect it.



    I installed Poper Blocker, which can also block overlays. It didn't detect these on its own, and navigating to the context menu was treated as navigating off the window, so there wasn't a way to get Poper Blocker to check while the window was present. This doesn't definitively rule out overlays, but Poper Blocker is the only add-on I'm aware of that blocks them, so either way, this doesn't lead to a solution.


  • Blocking specific URLs. These pop-ups aren't URLs.

  • This question on the Mozilla support forum is about URL pop-ups, but the accepted answer discusses some changes in Firefox V61 that can be fixed by modifying userChrome.css. I have no idea whether that's related, and it wouldn't explain the similar problem with Chromium-based and Microsoft browsers. I'm also not a programmer, so even if that is a solution, it wasn't helpful to me.

  • I've verified that triggering by passing over is not a browser malfunction due to add-ons.


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