When following one of my many & varied links the other day, Webduck encountered a rather graphic ad, which was unfortunate (It’s sent her bandwidth bill through the roof as she keeps going back to it), but when I had visited the site I didn’t see it - because I use Adblock Plus.
ABP is a free extension to the FireFox web browser which will block most ads, banners, rotating & flashing images, pop-ups etc. and will take a website that looks like this:
To this:
Which is certainly easier on the eyes, as things aren’t flashing anymore. ABP will also work with Google Adsense and a fair few others. Should you encounter some ads that it hasn’t blocked, simply right click them & add them to your blacklist.
All you need to run it is a copy of FireFox, and then just go install the ABP extension. While you’re there, get the Filterset updater to keep your blacklists up to date.
Is it hypocritical that I run ads and use Adblock Plus? No, because the sort of people who click on ads, don’t use ABP - people who hate ads and would appreciate ABP wouldn’t click on them anyway - please feel free to use ABP when visiting my blogs, I really don’t mind at all.
You can disable ABP with one click on certain websites, which is handy for your own, and I’d also recommended it when using online application forms, banking etc. as it can block what you want to see. It learns as it goes though, and I wouldn’t use the net without it.
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I believe some people have this feature modified to exclude my blog entirely — and if you know how to do that, Chris, I do hope you won’t share….
What’s it worth?
Update: tried it, don’t like it, but I gave it a shot.
I wouldn’t surf without it!
I use Adblock Plus. I do not like “in your face” ads, so this is a great help.
I hate the fact I have to use IE at work, so I have to see all the ads