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Remove Google Sign In

Today I learned an easy way to to get rid of the 'Sign In with Google' prompt.

I just got tired of clicking the X to close it when I'm browsing and for whatever reason, I decided I'd fix it this morning while scanning the news. It's pretty ubiquitous, but the two sites I regularly see it on are Zillow and Reddit. You can disable it if you stay signed into Google, but I don't even though I use regularly Google Workspace accounts in Chrome.

I generally do all my surfing in a Safari private tab with it's built in privacy controls for preventing cross-site tracking and hiding my IP address1. I'm just not too hip on having my browsing history influence my results2. And since I'm a fan of not using any third party anything, I started by trying to configure Apple ScreenTime using a content filter, but realized that would also stop me from accessing other Google Workspace features in other browsers.

The Sign In with Google feature is loaded into third party websites via into an iframe from https://accounts.google.com/gsi/ by JavaScript. And because of this the CSS ID is identical for all of the websites which makes pretty easy to hide using a browser extension to run custom scripts. I installed the userscipts open source extension3 for Safari which allows me to enable the scripts per domain and added one line to it:

#credential_picker_container { display:none !important; }

Anytime that that sign in pops up, I just enable the userscript for that domain. It'll cost me and additional click for a little while but will likely start saving me time after a week or so.

Footnotes​

  1. Safari & Privacy - https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/safari/ ↩

  2. Dirty Algorithm - https://davidawindham.com/dirty-algorithm/ ↩

  3. quoid/userscripts - Github - https://github.com/quoid/userscripts ↩