Option to suppress Google Image's own popup

[dadler]

This was suggested by "skywalka" aka g...g...@... in an add-on review:

It can be slightly overwhelming on the Google Image Search page because their thumbnails automatically popup slightly on hover then TZP pops up the popup. It would be great if the middleman could be cut out. But it could be argued that is not within the scope of TZP so I'll give it 5 stars.

My thoughts:

Yes, the double popups are a little annoying on Google Images, and I'll think about an option to suppress them. If you turn off Javascript in Firefox preferences, it'll actually behave like that as-is, actually. If you happen to use Greasemonkey, you might check whether there's an option there to suppress Google Images popups.

I'm concerned that if Thumbnail Zoom Plus suppressed them, users won't anymore see the other info which appears in the Google popup, like web site domain, description, resolution, and View Similar and More Sizes links. And there's risk that it might break something else on Google Images if I try to do that, making users unhappy with Thumbnail Zoom Plus. But I'll think about if there's a safe way to do it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Possible approaches to implementation it: disable the specific event handler Google uses; rewrite the web page to remove whatever triggers the popups; disable javascript entirely on the page. The approach must be compatible with Autopager. Also check whether there's a Greasemonkey script which does this, and could provide inspiration. If this is added to Thumbnail Zoom Plus, it should be via a user preference and by default Google Images should show its own popups like usual.

[dadler]

The greasemonkey script at "Google Images Basic View" http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/108538 forces Google Images to have the old look, without Google's popups. This might be a model for how Thumbnail Zoom Plus could do it.

The script basically adds &sout=1 to the end of a search result URL.

So instead of http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1396&bih=753&q=dog&gbv=2&oq=dog&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1497l1754l0l1871l3l3l0l0l0l0l99l184l2l2l0

it uses http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1396&bih=753&q=dog&gbv=2&oq=dog&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1497l1754l0l1871l3l3l0l0l0l0l99l184l2l2l0&sout=1

Unfortunately this is entirely the old Google Images look, with a lot of wasted white space between the image thumbs.

[skyworlka]

Thanx for looking into this.

AutoPager only works on the old Google Images. It doesn't seem to do anything on the new Google Images site. I think Google implemented their own type of autopaging where the space is already allocated but the thumbnails only load on demand.

The old Google Images does have a lot of wasted space between thumbs. The new Google Images wastes even more space for the horizontal menus, buttons & Search Box. The whole page could do with a major facelift. Again, that's beyond the scope of thumbnail zoom.

Thanx again.

[dadler]

It turns out this would be pretty easy to implement (by not propagating the mouseOver event). The main drawback is that without the popup we may not be able to get the Google pop-up's caption text, so TZP's caption would be less useful.

This would need to be a user preference since some users may prefer the Google popup and better caption text.