Google Chrome - Inspect & Delete Element

[alexh]

This is way off topic but I thought it might be of some interest to other web users.

I sometimes want to "acquire" text about Thalion games, pictures of disks, boxes, magazine scans etc. from other websites I have found, for archive purposes or perhaps reuse on my website. (I always give credit for sources) However depending on how commercial the website is (e.g. Magazine or newspaper publisher websites) they often have electronic countermeasures to prevent you from simply select, right click, cut/save-as.

For many years I've been able to grab images and text using the "Inspect" built in feature of Google Chrome that opens the web-page HTML (and Java Script) in an editor alongside the webpage and I could usually find the text and/or the reference to the source URL for the image that I want to nab.

Just recently I saw that in the "Inspect" editor of Chrome there was now a new feature (might have been there a long time but it was new to me) called "Delete Element". This allows you to real-time edit the displayed webpage.

So what is so good about that? Well typically you can delete most simple run-time electronic countermeasures.

e.g. You're on a site, reading a news article, it puts a layer over the article you can't skip... Right click, "Inspect", move the mouse around the HTML editor, it highlights what portion of the screen that element affects, find the pop-up, right click "delete element".

I was amazed how intuitive it is to use and how deleting elements at random rarely corrupts the entire page. If it does you can just "undo" and try a different element.

[exxos]

Yeah I use those features for debugging stuff as I can change CSS in the browser directly :)