No More Ads…
Have you ever opened a website in your browser, only to be greeted by a flashing pop-up, a bunch of rotating banners, and an ad so big you couldn’t see more than about 20 words on the page? You certainly may have, depending on what sites you go to. Many sites try to be discrete about their ads, but others have no qualms about pasting ads all over your screen.
We are going to find out how to block those ads, and in the process, we’ll speed up and secure your internet browsing.
First, why ads?
Well, as you may have noticed, a lot of sites on the internet are free. By free, I mean no cost to you. However, it costs someone time and resources to make that page available to you. Since you and thousands of others look at that free page, an advertiser might want to show you some product you may be interested in. Advertisers really enjoy when they can get their target audience in front of their ads, so maybe they post an ad about the latest pop album (Jesse McCartney’s Departure) on a music website (JMClovers.net: Don’t worry, I’m not a member… yet).
For this reason, it is always good to support the sites you appreciate by viewing the ads and if you see one that appeals to you, click on it.
However, many sites just plain go overboard. For those sites, we’ll learn how to combat those ads.
What do we need?
Here are our tools for tonight:
- Mozilla Firefox – Chances are you have it if you read and followed along with the post from last night, you already have Firefox installed.
- Adblock Plus – The Firefox add-on pulls data from a filter list that is automatically updated. You can also add “whitelist” sites and remove items the filter may have missed. We’ll learn how to add sites to the whitelist and filter missed items later.
What? You were expecting more? Let’s get going.
After you’ve installed Adblock Plus and restarted your Firefox, you will be presented with a filter selection box.
The above image is from the Adblock Plus site.
Choose the list that is closest by for you (or perhaps in a different language if you need). For US and Canada, you may select the Easy list.
When you begin navigating to your favorite pages, you will notice fewer of the banner ads and annoying blinking ads. The added benefit to this add-on is that once you install it, it blocks the ads before they ever even come to your computer, therefore, instead of waiting for ads to load THEN waiting for your content to load (because they give you the ads first!), you get to head straight to the content.
Want to see the difference?
So much more visually appealing! Well, except for that guy in the middle of the picture.
If you are still seeing elements and pictures on the page that you don’t want to see, you can easily right click on the element or image and select the option “Adblock Plus: Block image…”
On the other hand, if you end up at a page that you frequent, you want to support them, and they have ads that appeal to you, you can head to the stop sign icon in the upper right corner of your browser, click the down arrow, and select to disable Adblock Plus for the site. Lifehacker is one of my favorites and they are ad supported, so I whitelist their ads.
Now you are in complete control
It used to be that you had to deal with ads. If they were large pictures or rotated ads on a regular basis, that slowed down your connection. Avoiding ads altogther meant not visiting your favorite sites. With Adblock Plus, that is a thing of the past. You now control what ads you see and what ads you don’t.
If you need help setting up Adblock Plus or you have a stubborn ad that just won’t go away, feel free to contact The Digitante either by clicking the Google Voice widget on the right or by heading to the About page to send an email.
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