Posted on 05/15/2009 11:15:20 AM PDT by GATOR NAVY
Firefox's ad-removal tool is its most popular add-on. Now its creator wants to let you use it ethically.
First, a confession: I read the Web without ads. For years now, I've been using Adblock Plus, a plug-in for Firefox that eliminates nearly every ad I encounter online. I understand the irony here; Slate and other publications I've written for make money from advertisements, so my blocking them is akin to an airline pilot siphoning fuel from his tank before he takes off. And now, by discussing the appeal of ad-blocking software in this column, you could say I'm making matters worse.
Still, it's time we talked about ad blocking. The practice is ferociously popular, and it isn't going away. According to Mozilla's stats, Adblock Plus is the most-downloaded add-on for Firefox, attracting more than 700,000 new adherents a week. In all, it's been downloaded almost 49 million times. The appeal isn't hard to understand. The first time I loaded up Adblock, it was like shooting my browser up with Bandwidth Growth Hormone. The software gave a speed-boost to everything I did online. In order to catch your attention, many Web ads are stuffed with complex animation and sounds. Keeping all those aliens dancing eats up a lot of your computer's resources, which is one of the reasons your machine's performance plummets if you open many pages that are stuffed with ads. Ad-blocking software prevents your browser from connecting to well-known advertising servers. This lets you load pages faster and devote more of your machine's processing power to important stuff, like playing Hulu videos.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I’m an AdBlock addict.
No guilt here. Like the author, I was surprised how much more efficient FF3 became after I installed this add-on.
I just removed Adblock Plus because it turned out that Noscript was disabling almost all the annoying ads anyway, along with Flashblock. There’s very little difference in what I see now without Adblock. Just a few static ads I don’t mind.
Blocking the ad pages also prevents them from getting info about your browsing habits. Another bonus.
I feel behind the curve, not having used this plug in before.
All that other junk doesn't have a right to MY bandwidth.
You should be using the REFCONTROL 0.8.11 add on. You can set the url referrer address to anything you like, such as http//www.Obama-is-a-Marxist-commie.com. ;)
I use AdBlock and NoScript. For me, it’s not about bandwidth. Most of the ads nowadays I find truly offensive.
http://www.torproject.org/
I’ve heard of Flashblock but I don’t have it. Sounds like either Flashblock or Adblock works but there is no point in having both.
AdBlock here - and I don’t have any guilt about using it.
I don't mind seeing the google text ads too much. It's the flashy, blinky, look at me attention whore ads that cause me to install ad-block.
There are ads on the internet?
Between ABP and a custom hosts file, I don’t see any.
You can use “Hostal” (for the Macintosh), too...
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/hostal.html
It’s a little program that makes it easy for you to handle and manipulate a “hosts” file on your computer... (and this will block web addresses and sites and ads and so on...).
Hosts file
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file
I’ve been using AdMuncher for years. It’s a tiny program, very computer friendly, and I never see an internet ad.
A post script: I said earlier that I removed Adblock due to its redundancy when Noscript and Flashblock are installed. But a few static display ads do come through, although they tend not to be annoying ones. It just happened this evening that I saw an ad for a health insurance co. in my state that I was not familiar with — just the ticket since we will probably be losing our insurance. So once in a while — not that often — it is useful to see tailored ads.
That's it. There was one weather website that took forever to load because of all the ads on the page. Adblocked them, and voila! a fast, clean webpage.
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