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There are a few things I miss from my Opera 12 days, and one of them is that Opera allows blocking the content that we don't want by clicking on it, e.g. an ad image, or perhaps a div. When we click Block Content, Opera would let us hover our mouse around and it will show rectangular borders on areas that we can block. I can block things like a marquee/scrolling text (which eats my CPU) or sidebars which I don't want to see, or other things.

Is there anything similar for Firefox? I am using uBlock Origin and AdNauseam, and have also tried addons that block by website hostname, or by type (HTML, script, image, object, media, CSS), or specific sites like content farms, and they are useful; but sometimes you just want to turn off that part of page on a website which is annoying or distracting.

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  • Don't I feel stupid :) Thanks @bertieb. The element picker mode is exactly what I meant!
    – Budiman Snowman
    May 30, 2019 at 12:19
  • Not at all, I'll write that up as an answer in case someone else is looking for it. FWIW, software recommendations (including addons) are off-topic on Super User, but in this case it's possible to rephrase your question as "how do I achieve <content blocking>", so it can be edited to do so.
    – bertieb
    May 30, 2019 at 12:32
  • (I have edited your question to remove the request of an addon from the title)
    – bertieb
    May 30, 2019 at 12:42

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uBlock Origin can block content using its 'element picker'

There are a few things I miss from my Opera 12 days, and one of them is that Opera allows blocking the content that we don't want by clicking on it, e.g. an ad image, or perhaps a div. (...) I am using uBlock Origin ...

Good news! You can do what Opera 12 let you do with uBlock Origin, which you already have installed.

From the element picker documentation:

The element picker's purpose is to assist the user in the creation of network or cosmetic filters.

If there is an element on a web page you wish to remove forever, open the extension's popup menu, and click the small "eye-dropper" icon. You will enter the interactive element picker mode.

element picker

Note that in addition to what the documentation on that linked page says, you can also right click on an element, and select "Block element" from the context menu.

Removing elements / Adding filters

For example, I can remove your question text as following:

demo

Note: removing question text may make it trickier to answer questions on StackEchange sites

Restoring elements / Removing filters

If you want to restore an element - say, you've decided that being able to read question text is handy - you can do this by removing the filters that apply to it.

Open the uBlock dashboard (click on the toolbar icon and then the icon with the sliders) and go to the My filters tab, from there you can see your filters:

ublock filters

From there, you can remove the relevant filters. In my case, that would be #20 and #21.

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