I just wrote the post seen below, and realized that it went on for WAY longer than it needed to. So I'll recap, in case you're busy: If you want to stop the NY Times website from redirecting you everytime you highlight text, use Firefox with the Adblock plugin, and add a blocking rule for *.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js The rest of the post can be ignored.

There are a lot of little annoyances on the web. Popups, redirects, blogs written by idiots. Some of them we can do nothing about, but for some we do have a recourse (taking me out of your feed reader, as a quick example).

Talking with Ben the other day, I was reminded about how annoying things could be. He regaled me with a tale of having to use Internet Explorer 7 for watching some video online (that's another one of those annoyances: Why on earth would any company deploy a system that requires you to use a particular browser is beyond me. Some strategy meeting with a pointy-haired boss saying something like "I think the size of our target market is a little too large. What can we do about that?"), and he found that there were a lot of popups.

By now you should know that using Firefox goes a long way to make your web browsing popup-free (even if it also makes your machine sluggish). But it's not everything. A particular thing that bugs me is that whenever I'm highlighting text on the New York Times online, it takes me to a page that tells me the definition of a word. I'm not interested in that at all, ever, and it makes me angry. But! I just learned (from Boing Boing)that you can stop this if you are using the AdBlock plugin for Firefox, and add a blocking rule for *.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

It works, and makes me so happy. But why do I have to do that to make a site not suck? Didn't somebody tell that that was a horrible idea to begin with? Maybe not. I've got to go send an email.