ESPN’s website has an annoying “feature”: a video player that starts playing the latest sports highlights as soon as you load the ESPN.com page. This makes it difficult to stealthily check scores at work, it makes the page load slowly… and it’s just all around annoying.
You can stop the video player from appearing by creating an ESPN.com account and disabling the player in the user preferences. But that’s a pain, especially if you don’t want to give ESPN your information. If you use Firefox and have AdBlock Plus installed, you can easily disable the player by opening the AdBlock preferences and adding the following to a new filter:
http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/mpf/players/*
Thanks to this site for the tip!