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This week, I ended up looking up how to turn off something that was driving me nuts. I seriously doubt I'm the only person who finds the little "Snap Preview" on Web sites to be screamingly annoying. So I thought I'd share what I learned about how to make it go away.
For those who haven't encountered it yet, the Snap Preview is a little window that pops up when you hover over a link on various blogs and Web sites. I'm not sure what purpose it's supposed to serve; as far as I can tell, it just gets in the way of normal browsing. It's like a pop-up window you cause by innocently attempting to click a link. It's right up there with "bubble help" among things I find extremely irritating. Probably it's one of those "Web 2.0 features" that I'm just not hip or cool enough to understand. Whatever it is, in my opinion, it's an aggravating bandwidth-wasting piece of garbage that just gets in the way.
In theory you can turn it off by clicking the little icon on the right side of the window and choosing Disable. Except doing so doesn't seem to actually disable it. Another approach is to go to the Snap.com site and click a link to place a cookie on your system to turn it off. Go to this page:
http://www.snap.com/about/shots_faq.php
and under "For Site Visitors Deactivation," click the link. Unfortunately, because the deactivation uses cookies, if you have your browser set to dump cookies, this solution will only be temporary. However, there are a couple of other options.
If you have a pop-up ad blocker, you may be able to include this URL to kill it:
spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js
Alternatively, you can modify your Hosts file to make it go away in every browser you use. In Windows XP, the Hosts file is generally located in:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS
It is a text file, so open it in Notepad and add this line:
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com # disable Snap Preview
You can read more about editing the Hosts file in this article:
Use the Hosts File to Block Sites
Since I never, ever want to see Snap again, I edited my hosts file. It's gone now.
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