I didn't even get an ad, the page just covered itself in black stripes with a little white lozenge in the middle.

Chrome + F12, inspect element, delete.

I do this too often. We screwed the web.

I wonder if--in the same way most browsers use a heuristic to block pop-ups if they weren't triggered by a user action--we could come up with an effective heuristic to do the same for pop-overs.

I'd think the simplest thing would be blocking "position: fixed; width: 100%; height: 100%;" curtain elements, along with anything that stacks "above" them. They only have two valid uses that I can think of: displaying lightbox-like image galleries, and embedding modal confirmation dialogs in single-page apps. It'd probably be easier to figure out a heuristic to whitelist these two uses, and deny everything else.

I'm a pretty big fan of Evernote Clearly; easier than poking around in the inspector, especially if the element in question is flash.

I have found the Click to Remove Element extension useful in Chrome.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/click-to-remove-el...

Wow. It's Colorbox, and they fucked it up.

AdBlock + NoScript

I never even knew there was supposed to be an annoying ad covering things up.

If you wait long enough it goes away, but yeah I agree I didn't bother reading due to the ad.

Install Readability [0] as a bookmarklet. As long as the article is on the page (aka not Forbes), it will process it correctly.

[0] https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

Hitting Escape made it go away for me.