How to disable Netflix previews

Netflix has some really annoying auto-play preview ads which they provided no option to prevent.

  • I like to stop and wind down to watch a show on occasion. I use Netflix for that since someone was kind enough to share their account data with me. While I would never pay for a television content service, using theirs for free has provided an acceptable and convenient alternative to using torrents to acquire media, for media which they provide access to.

    They recently added a new feature which shows previews and plays audio as soon as you log into their web front end. This makes the experience of using their site way worse and they didn't provide a way to prevent the new behavior. As a web developer, I have no problem determining what part of the page the previews reside on and preventing the display of that part of the Netflix interface.

    First off, for Chrome users, you'll need a copy of Tampermonkey added to your active extensions in Chrome. After you have Tampermonkey installed, you'll need to create a new script and copy/paste this into it:

    // ==UserScript==
// @name         NetflixPreviewBlocker
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  try to take over the world!
// @author       You
// @match        https://www.netflix.com/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';
    function addGlobalStyle(css) {
        console.log("GLOBALSTYLE");

        var head, style;
        head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
        if (!head) { return; }
        style = document.createElement('style');
        style.type = 'text/css';
        style.innerHTML = css;
        head.appendChild(style);
    }

    addGlobalStyle('.billboard-row {display:none}');
})();