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Effective Ad, Site and Popup Blocking for Today's Internet -- For Microsoft Windows-based Computers |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 03 November 2005 |
Remember how the Internet used to be? Very few or no ads, pages that
were easy to read and loaded quickly (even with standard phone
dial-up). Today, many sites are brimming with pop-up ads, which hugely
slow page-loading and make the real content (text and images) difficult
to read.
You can somewhat address these annoyances by paying for
commercially-available pop-up and ad-blockers. But with a little bit of
effort, you can save your money, create a vastly more-effective
solution, and learn a little bit about how "adware" works.
Here's what to do:
1. If you're not already using Mozilla Firefox as your default browser, switch now!
It's several orders of magnitude better than Microsoft Internet
Explorer for many reasons. One of them is a wealth of open-source-based
plug-ins that further enhance the already-superior qualities of
Firefox.
2. Basic Firefox comes with a pretty good (built-in)
popup blocker. But for truly effective blocking, you need an extension
called Adblock. After downloading Adblock, you will need to exit (and
then restart) Firefox in order to install it.
3. Go to a site with lots of animated ads. As an example, I will use this site: http://www.tomshardware.com/index.html.
4. On the lower right-hand corner of the Firefox
browser window, you should see a small box with the text Adblock (if
you don't see it here, press Ctrl+Shift+A). You should see a small
window appear with the title "Adblock-able items". It will be full of
URLs (i.e., "http://...")
5. Scroll this window and look for URLs with the word
"ad". An example on this site is: "http://www.ad.tomshardware.com/...".
Click one of URLs -- it will be editable just under "New filter (use *
as a wildcard):". The wildcard makes all the difference between low-
and high-maintenance ad-blocking.
6. Place an * after the URL given in the last step,
such as: "http://www.ad.tomshardware.com/*". Now click OK. You should
see some ads from the tomshardware.com page vanish. Go back to Adblock
and try this trick with a few more URLs. After a while, you will get a
feel for "ady" URLs; many of the same ad-placers are, in fact, used by
lots of web sites. So it's not as if you're going to be editing the
Adblock list for every site you encounter -- well, at least, not after
a few days of "teaching" Adblock to ditch these ads.
7. If you Adblock a URL, but later change your mind,
do this: press Ctrl+Shift+P, you will see a window titled "Adblock
Preferences" appear. Search for the URL which you want to delete
(reverse), right click on it, and choose Delete. Adblock Preferences
can be used to control many other features of this utility.
The next article will focus on a more-global solution to popup and ad-blocking -- one that works for virtually all browsers.
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Description of Adblock from mozilla.org:
If you're tired of all the intrusive adverts that are increasingly
taking over the Internet, Adblock is for you. Using the numerous free
filter repositories available on the net and the intuitive blocking
tools, you are able to customise your Firefox so that the most annoying
ads are not displayed, thus leaving you to browse safely and to enjoy
your Internet experience.
However you should note that many websites are supported by revenue
from ads. You should consider this carefully before you block all the
ads on the site. Perhaps just blocking intrusive ads like popups and
flash ads with sound is enough? If everyone blocked all the ads on that
site, then the webmaster might be forced to close it.
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