SurfRabbit Views Websites the Way You Want to

There are many, many websites out there, and some you visit more than others. The more you visit a site, the more there will be little things that start nagging you. This is something that applies to everything… the more you are exposed to something, the more you see its limitations and bad sides. While some things you can control, other you can't, and, usually, what is present on a webpage is beyond your reach. SurfRabbit is a program that changes all that and lets you control some of what happens on those web pages.

Customize web sites
SurfRabbit is a Shiira and Safari plugin that lets you choose which elements of a website you wish displayed, and how the elements that are displayed look. Note that these changes are only in effect on your browser, not on the site itself. So only you will be viewing them and they will only be in effect as long as you browse from the SurfRabbit enabled browser.

View in style
Most websites these days use Cascading Style Sheets to specify how the content is displayed. Using SurfRabbit you can specify your own CSS definitions that will be applied to the web page.

The program offers quite a bit of flexibility here on how you want to handle these declarations, and how they interact with the display preferences defined in your browser preferences. You can choose to give priority to the CSS definitions inside SurfRabbit or to give priority to the setting from the browser preferences.

As you might have already deduced, this functionality of SurfRabbit is only useful if you already have knowledge of CSS… Those who are not familiar with CSS will not be able to get much, if any, benefit from this option.

View Selectively
Websites can get very crowded, and the makers more often than not want to stuff everything they can in there. Using SurfRabbit you can select potions of the site that will not be displayed, at all. This lets you fine-tune the content to your desire.

Doing so is quite easy and anyone can do it. Once you are in the customizing interface, whenever you hover the mouse over an element, you will see a red dotted outline around it. Clicking on that outline, or within the selection will place a red highlight over that part of the site, signifying that it will not be displayed.

More often than not, because sites are usually created with a mind boggling mix of frames and table and dynamically generated content, selecting exactly what you want can prove difficult. To help, the developer has included two buttons that expand or contract the space between all the elements of the page in order to make them easier to select. Once you have selected all the content you do not wished displayed, you can preview the changes and then save them.

Compatibility
While SurfRabbit will in theory work with any site, that is not always the case. This is because most of today's sites have a huge amount of dynamically generated content, and that is not always predictable. Usually you can disable an entire part of a site, but when it comes to the little individual elements, they are always changing and thus harder to work with.

Selectivity
SurfRabbit is a great tool, it allows you to fine tune the content you wish to see and filter out the unwanted one. Now, most of you will be thinking 'great, I can finally get rid of all those pesky adds'… Yes, SurfRabbit does have the power to let you disable the adds that are present on a certain site. However, this is a double bladed sword.

If you visit a site enough that you start getting bothered by the adds, that means you probably visit it a lot, and make good use of it. It also means that you can freely visit that site. The site is free because of those adds, and without them you would have to pay. By disabling the adds that are present on a site you use regularly, you are hurting the site. If everyone used programs such as this, and blocked out all the adds, then there would be no more free site and every site would ask for something in order to view it, be it money, or information.

I am not saying that you should under no circumstances use this to block adds, but in doing so, remember that you are hurting the site. If you really have an add that annoys you, go ahead, get rid of it, but try not going overboard and disabling each and every add.

The Good
Lets you customize and fine-tune the content of webpages in a pretty easy and straightforward way.

The Bad
The documentation is a bit inaccessible, and should be placed directly in the menu.

The Truth
Choose how and what you see on webpages… a powerful tool, and like all such tools, it should be used wisely.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: