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Mozilla Adblock Extension : All Your Ads are Belong to Us!
I have written in the past about Cascade and Calender extensions for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox but the latest Mozilla extension that I can't live with out is AdBlock
Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker.
Adblock allows the user to specify filters, which remove unwanted content based on the source-address. If this sounds complicated, don't worry: it's not.
Just add a few filters. Every time a web page loads, Adblock will intercept and disable the elements matching your filters. See? nothing to it.
The AdBlock extension for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox is quite an impressive effort and regular use can make surfing the web an enjoyable user experience much like it was before the web was overrun with invasive ads and spam in the early 90s. Jakob Nielsen is right on in how advertising has started to take over more and more of the browsing experience and is now taking over more screen real estate and more mental space.
Here is how it works. After you install the extension it installs several in-context menus. All you have to do is go to a site that you read and right click on the ad. It will bring up a dialog box with the URL of that image.
http://www.acomputermaker.com/main/affiliate_pages/banners/01_button_120x60.gif
Then all you do is find what directory you want to block and insert an asterisk where you want to start blocking. Like so:
http://www.acomputermaker.com/main/*
Then hit OK and all the ads from that directory will not be downloaded and not displayed when you surf. It make take a couple times but after a while you can surf your favorite sites without the ads and the website server will never know because you are filtering on the client side.
To block Macromedia Flash ads can be a bit more tricky. After you install Adblock it will create a transparent Adblock tag to Flash movies and you can block it by clicking on that. If not you can pause the playback of Flash files for that site by selecting the drop down menu
Tools: Adblock : Overlay Flash ( Allows Right Click )
Then right click on the paused Flash object and bring up the URL of the Flash ad.
http://www.bignewspaper.com/RealMedia/ads/Creatives/twt_redmatch_2004May/twt_redmatch_120x600.swf
Then insert another wild card asterisk like so
http://www.bignewspaper.com/RealMedia/ads/*
The way that Adblock really stands out from other ad filtering is that it can block specific directories in a web server so you can take out the ads without screwing up the content. If you notice that you may have blocked too much you can edit your filters from the Adblock preference menu.
Adblock is not an out of the box end all solution to annoying ads on web pages but it is a powerful tool that enables the user to filter out what they do and do not want to look at while surfing the web. I don't really have an issue with the ethical issues of using this because I never intentional click on interstitial flash ads. OK perhaps 0.01% of the time but it is damn rare. Yes I do know that some places are counting on ad revenue but I only block the really annoying ads. If we had a real micropayment system then there would be less bad banner ads. But until then I am damn glad that I installed Adblock.
Oh yeah Popups still suck
Update: Another thing. There is this really annoying splash image of this super happy woman from a stock photo library at the home page of my bank. I just got sick of staring at her ugly mug every time I wanted to log in and check out my bank account so I used Adblock and created a filter so I will never have to look at it ever again. So it is good for all things that you want to edit out not just ads.
Jake at May 11, 2004 
WebDev
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Comments
Adblock is really great!! Thanks for the tip Jake ;-)
Posted by: Wedge at September 7, 2004 12:56 PM
Someone should make a directory compiled with common adds that need to be blocked.
Posted by: Bob at February 20, 2005 6:32 AM
Well Bob you should get on it and make it yourself.
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at February 20, 2005 1:59 PM
