Hide Google's begging (or any other web content) via a Firefox userContent trick (Shallow Thoughts)

Hide Google's begging (or any other web content) via a Firefox userContent trick

Lately, Google is wasting space at the top of every search with a begging plea to be my default search engine.

Google already is my default search engine -- that's how I got to that page. But if you don't have persistent Google cookies set, you have to see this begging every time you do a search. (Why they think pestering users is the way to get people to switch to them is beyond me.)

Fortunately, in Firefox you can hide the begging with a userContent trick. Find the chrome directory inside your Firefox profile, and edit userContent.css in that directory. (Create a new file with that name if you don't already have one.) Then add this:

#taw { display: none !important; }

Restart Firefox, do a Google search and the begs should be gone.

In case you have any similar pages where there's pointless content getting in the way and you want to hide it: what I did was to right-click inside the begging box and choose Inspect element. That brings up Firefox's DOM inspector. Mouse over various lines in the inspector and watch what gets highlighted in the browser window. Find the element that highlights everything you want to remove -- in this case, it's a div with id="taw". Then you can write CSS to address that: hide it, change its style or whatever you're trying to do.

You can even use Inspect element to remove elements immediately. That won't help you prevent them from showing up later, but it can be wonderful if you need to use a page that has an annoying blinking ad on it, or a mis-designed page that has images covering the content you're trying to read.