I’m visiting my Grandmother. It’s amazing that she loves her MacBook and loves checking email and Facebook daily into her 90s.
BUT no matter how much we say “scroll past” things you don’t want to see on Facebook, she wants to make them “go away” and clicks on adware sites.
More than once a week her computer is playing claxon noises in full screen at maximum volume and saying to call their service number. Fortunately she knows not to call, but it’s hard to get out of those websites without some know how.
For these examples this week, escape to exit full screen and quitting Safari solved the problem.
But I’m wondering if there could be a way to have a shortcut run from a key combo she could type to exit full screen, quit Safari, clear cache, something like that.
Asking because I’m on site for a visit, but usually helping remotely. I have remote access set up, but these sites lock things up so much that remote access may not always work, so wondering if I can set up something to help ahead of time.
Not an easy problem to solve since usually the machine is totally locked. Any help or creative ideas appreciated!
Rather than trying to remedy clicking on ads and the fallout from that, of which you list several potential remedial actions (it isn’t clear to me exactly which of them you would want to trigger every time), have you considered applying an ad blocker to eliminate the issue at source to resolve the underlying want of your grandmother?
Search for “facebook adware blocker” on your favourite search engine, and you will be presented with a range of options.
1 Like
Look into NextDNS. It’s cheap and you can manage it remotely. It’s what I use for my grandmother because she also would run into these sites too often.
1 Like
Thanks so much for the helpful replies everyone! This community is the best.
I had forgotten about ad blockers. I want to support sites and their is the risk the can “break” things. But her web browsing is so passive I think it makes sense in this case. So I installed one in her browser.
And I was able to write a super simple shortcut to just resize the window and quit safari, and saved it in the menu bar. And confirmed when Safari starts fresh it just returns to the home page, not open tabs. So there is another option in case my on-site people can’t type command Q or get out of full screen.
I’ll look into the DNS option too! 