The RIP Extension for Firefox lets you customize the web with a variety of features that are not available through the standard web browser. You can add your own custom icons, fonts, and other elements to make your web pages look more professional. You can also use the RIP Extension to create custom Firefox profiles that let you access different web pages and content from any computer in your network.
We like to use RIP for creating a printer friendly page or removing advertisements from web pages. We can click on any elements on a web page and remove the elements by selecting the appropriate command from the UI. The second method is by specifying the XPath to the HTML elements that we want to block.
Let us take a look at how we can block HTML elements by selecting them and remove it from the UI.
Removing Advertisements
Regular Geek is one of the many Tech Blogs that I regularly visited to get a daily dose of geek stuff. Let’s take a look at one of his article.
RIP allows us to remove any advertisement from the webpage by selecting each individual ad on the web page.
This is what the article looks like after we remove all the advertisement on the page.
Creating a Printer Friendly Webpage
This is what Regular Geek article looks like out of the printer. Look at the wasted top space by text fields the tabs. We can remove those unnecessary items using RIP to create a cleaner print out of the article.
RIP has a feature where we can remove web page elements by specifying its Xpath.
XPath is a language for finding information in an XML document that we can use to identify specific web elements and remove them from the web page.
The Regular Geek’s article header’s XPath looks like this:
The article has a better print layout without the header.
Help on XPath
Xpath can be a little bit daunting if you do not have any experience with it before. A good place to start learning XPath is by reading W3C’s introduction to XPath. Alternatively we can install Firefox plugin such as X-Ray that gives a good visualisation on the web page’s structure.
Conclusion
RIP is one option that we can use to remove unwanted web page elements to create a more readable web page. There are other alternatives such as Clippable , an easy to use bookmarklet to produce a printer friendly page version of a web page.
