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I love Adblock plugins, and install them on a variety of browsers. They hide or remove ads, which take out a lot of clutter from sites.

However, I was thinking, is there any Adblock-like plugin (the more cross-browser the better, currently using Chrome, but my Girlfriend is between Firefox and Opera) that hides social widgets, buttons, and the like?

The only social thing I don't want to remove is comments (such as the disqus ones), because most of the time they are meaningful to the content, but far too many sites have a horrible amount of "Like me", "Follow me" "Plus me" and so on. Some even have a terribly distractive bird that wants you to follow them at all costs by flying in front of what you want to read.

So what I want is a plugin that hides or removes: like/follow/plus buttons and counters, tweet feeds, social site sharing and bookmarking buttons (StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc), "mail to a friend", vertical tabs (literally) left and right, little "cute" effing blue birds flying on the screen, etc.

                                Too Social

I mean, something is wrong with my internets!

Edit:

Using lupincho's suggestion (an Adblock subscription), The result is the following:

                                    An improvement

Actually, there's still a lot of remainders in that page, so that page is now my test: the plugin that does the best cleaning job is the one I'll accept (even if it only works for one browser of the set Chrome|Firefox|Opera).

Please navigate to this page to see the use case.

Community
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Camilo Martin
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  • http://superuser.com/questions/361378/how-to-block-annoying-facebook-and-other-social-network-widgets – Lesmana Dec 13 '14 at 13:58

3 Answers3

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Ghostery does that; works with all major browsers.

Also, the "Antisocial" subscription for AdblockPlus.

lupincho
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  • Ghostery seems privacy-oriented, that's nice, but how does it block social sites' widgets? I'd like something designed for that purpose. I'll try the "Antisocial" subscription though, if it works as intended it's my choice. – Camilo Martin Feb 19 '12 at 08:26
  • Please see my edit of the question. – Camilo Martin Feb 19 '12 at 08:40
  • For widgets and other scripts, on Firefox you could try NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/. A combination of some or all of Ghostery, NoScript and Adblock Plus, possibly with custom filters, should work. But that's for Firefox; I don't know about other browsers. – lupincho Feb 19 '12 at 09:11
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    NoScript is a nuclear option... Also, some sites would completely break without javascript. At any rate, in lack of any alternative that does a better job on that page, I'll accept your "Antisocial" subscription. – Camilo Martin Feb 19 '12 at 09:14
  • NoScript has a whitelist; you could disable it per-site. – lupincho Feb 19 '12 at 09:15
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    Still, the trouble of having to mantain a whitelist puts me off. Nothing against it if you use it, of course (and it's on-topic as a suggestion, it may help someone). – Camilo Martin Feb 19 '12 at 10:09
  • Yes, it works for me because there are very few sites that I care about and that don't work without scripts enabled. But obviously it depends on the browsing habits. – lupincho Feb 19 '12 at 10:26
  • I ended up with the antisocial subscription. After all, its name matches my social behavior :) By the way, it blocked [a recent xkcd comic](http://xkcd.com/1025/) for containing the word "tumblr", I think :P – Camilo Martin Mar 12 '12 at 05:37
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The Fanboy Annoyance Block List for AdBlock Plus in Opera, Firefox and Chrome:

Blocks Social Media Content, In page Pop-Ups and other annoyances; thereby substantially decreasing web page loading times and uncluttering them.

galacticninja
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  • @CamiloMartin I prefer the Fanboy Annoyances block list to the Antisocial list, as it blocks more than just social media content (also in-page popups, newsletters, unnecessary links, self promos and other content that clutters sites unnecessarily). See a comparison between the two [here (link)](http://forums.fanboy.co.nz/forums/viewtopic.php?p=33347#p33347). – galacticninja May 11 '12 at 05:37
  • Oh, that comparison is very interesting, and this does look like something I would use. A great find, and since I'll likely forget to choose this as an answer instead (after some time using it), I'll tick it now. – Camilo Martin May 11 '12 at 05:44
  • This does not block facebook comment thread plugin. – tumchaaditya Jan 05 '14 at 17:52
  • @tumchaaditya You can report that at the EasyList forums, maybe they could fix that: http://forums.lanik.us/viewforum.php?f=62 Also, try [Ghostery](https://superuser.com/a/391563/10259). – galacticninja Jan 06 '14 at 01:16
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For Firefox, I use the Greasemonkey add-on and the Remove Facebook Like buttons (mod1) script.

Pang
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garyjohn
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  • But it only works for facebook, right? I don't like anything social. – Camilo Martin Feb 19 '12 at 08:27
  • It works for some others as well. I don't like any of those buttons, either, but this script is the closest I've found to something that will block all of them and it's a start. You might find something more comprehensive at userscripts.org. I haven't searched there recently. – garyjohn Feb 19 '12 at 09:49
  • The name is misleading, I thought it only worked for facebook. Still, it so far seems to be doing much the same as the Adblock "Antisocial" subscription. I'll keep trying to find a site where it hides something the other didn't, but so far it seems like a draw (and I prefer the subscription since there's no extra js to run). – Camilo Martin Feb 19 '12 at 10:19