Digg recently introduced the DiggBar to all links to articles from its site. This bar at the top of a page allows you to digg or bury an article, share it via e-mail, twitter, or facebook, and more.
Personally, I don’t like it. I found myself closing it every time I was looking at an article redirected from Digg. If I wanted to share a link, I’d get the original source instead of the Digg shortened URL so people would have an idea of where they were going (thanks Rick Rolls). Since I was closing it every time, I looked into how to disable it and because it wasn’t incredibly apparent I decided to post it here.
Now if you follow a Digg link and get the DiggBar, you can easily disable it. Hover near the X on the right-hand side and a little down arrow will appear.
Click on the down arrow and the DiggBar will expand to double its height. In the expanded part of the bar below, click on the link “Always hide the toolbar.” The tool will reload, just like if you clicked the X on the DiggBar, and it will come back up without the DiggBar. Now, all pages will load without the DiggBar.
You can also hide the toolbar through your profile preferences or if you decide at a later point in time you don’t want to Always hide the toolbar you can revert the setting back.
Just browse to your Profile, Settings, and Viewing Preferences while logged in (or follow this link) and you’ll see the drop-down option regarding the DiggBar. You can choose between “Never show DiggBar for external links” or “Always open external links with the DiggBar.” Be sure to hit the Save Changes button below and you’ll be able to enjoy your social news network DiggBar free.
This configuration obviously follows your account and doesn’t just set a cookie to mark the preference. As long as you’re logged in, you should be seeing things as you prefer in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or other web browsers.
I like making this change because it defeats the framing complaint that many have had. With the DiggBar, it automatically shows the shortened URL in the address bar, something like: http://digg.com/u3A9RI. This, in my opinion, does a disservice to those actually providing the content. It removes a lot of branding that the author’s try to get out there by getting people familiar with their URL. By setting the DiggBar to be hidden on external links, the original URL is shown and not the shortened Digg one. It also removes the Digg favicon from being displayed instead of the original site, making working with tabs easier.