Looks like Yahoo lets you toggle this off yourself, with a cookie. From Yahoo’s own help page: At the bottom of the page is an option to turn OFF expand/collapse. If you turn this off, you will not see the “Read Full Article” button anymore and will see only single, open pages.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/expandpage.html
If you frequent Yahoo News, you’ve likely noticed the site has been redesigned. Overall, the design is clean, information-rich, and provides a nice update to one of my favorite news sources. Along with the redesign, Yahoo has introduced a bizarre, annoying functionality to news stories. When a news story loads, you are delivered a truncated version of the story; to see the full story you are forced to click on the “Read Full Article” button that hovers midway in the page (generally next to an ad). This has proven endlessly frustrating.
I figured this issue would be easy to fix. Inspecting the code, the javascript controls are simple enough – the toggle is controlled by a simple onclick listener. Disable the script and all should be well, right? As it turns out, this is not as easy as it seems. The script was inline – included in the page – meaning the only way to block it was to block all javascript in the page. This makes Yahoo news fairly unusable. After playing around with Adblock Plus, however, I discovered a formula that works:
news.yahoo.com#*(class=ult-section mod read-more-toggle)
This filter will prevent toggling, displaying the full page when it loads. There are some side effects, the primary one being the story content loads last. I was willing to trade this off to not have to click each time I wanted to read the rest of the story. It appears that recently Firefox introduced functionality that enables just-in-time inspection and modification of pages. Perhaps when Adblock Plus is updated there will be a more elegant solution to the inline javascript issue.
Tags: javascript, yahoo
thanks for the tip, having to click for the full story was really annoying. I hope someone writes a greasemonkey script or yahoo comes to its senses and stops making us do this!
Yeah, it is especially annoying on an iphone. It takes forever to load. I don’t know what Yahoo was thinking, it really ruins a nice redesign.
I believe yahoo butchered the news site. The font is 6 points too big, there are far too many gaps between the stories making them difficult to read.. and yes, the read full article button..
Looks like Yahoo has changed the Javascript, so this will no longer work. I’ll see if I can fix it.
Looks like Yahoo lets you toggle this off yourself, with a cookie. From Yahoo’s own help page: At the bottom of the page is an option to turn OFF expand/collapse. If you turn this off, you will not see the “Read Full Article” button anymore and will see only single, open pages.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/expandpage.html
Thanks for that fix, Dan! I’ve bumped your comment.
Thanks a lot for this tip, I’m sure many others are grateful too :) What could possibly prompt Yahoo to implement such a feature is entirely beyond my comprehension. I find the button to be a nuisance, somewhat comparable to a toddler who throws a fit and sh*ts his diaper everytime mommy walks into the room. A few times I have actually decided to close the page instead of clicking the infernal button to read the rest of the story :p I agree that the new Yahoo layout is an overall improvement though, it’s not like Myspace or Youtube where updates are typically dreaded by users.