Ad blocking?

Posted by: tman

Ad blocking? - 02/05/2004 19:54

Has anybody used http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/ before for ad blocking? It seems to work a lot better than a plain hosts file itself.
Posted by: DWallach

Re: Ad blocking? - 03/05/2004 09:12

Just this morning, I switched over to Mozilla Firefox. One of the extension for it is called "AdBlock", and it's fantastic. You can right-click on any advertisement, and it gives you the option to nuke it. It also understands IFrame ads and can nuke the whole frame. In short, it does everything that I used to love WebWasher for. WebWasher, unfortunately, has been increasingly breaking sites that play fancy JavaScript games. When you've got your ad-blocking built into the browser, it seems to work a whole lot better.

The only other system like this that I've tried is Privoxy. It does a reasonable job, but again breaks sites that try to play fancy JavaScript games.
Posted by: DWallach

Re: Ad blocking? - 03/05/2004 13:47

I hate to follow up on my own posts, but Firefox + AdBlock is a wonderful, stable thing. It's safe to say that it's better than WebWasher, even when WebWasher was working at its best. The only problem I've found so far is with Weebl & Bob (of all places), which gets a "broken QuickTime" icon, although it's not clear that it ever worked in the first place with Firefox. Can somebody else check this?
Posted by: tman

Re: Ad blocking? - 03/05/2004 13:55

I just tried the latest Weebls & Bob and it worked fine. I didn't have the Macromedia Flash player for Firefox so I had to download and install that first though.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Ad blocking? - 03/05/2004 14:05

It's important to point out that Quicktime Player can also play Flash, so maybe that's why Dan's install is doing QT stuff.
Posted by: tman

Re: Ad blocking? - 03/05/2004 14:36

Ack. I hate Quicktime and it's default behaviour to try and grab every single file type association that it knows about. I installed Quicktime here and made sure it only played the Quicktime formats and it still decided to take over MPEG.
Posted by: DWallach

Re: Ad blocking? - 03/05/2004 17:14

I just check and, sure 'nuff, Firefox thinks QuickTime is the default handler for SWF (application/x-shockwave-flash). I tried re-running the Flash installer, which even knew about Firefox, but it didn't work. IE, of course, works just fine. Where are these settings stored? I can't find them anywhere, but I can see the ugliness when I type about:plugins. Do I need to dork with something in my registry?
Posted by: Ezekiel

Re: Ad blocking? - 04/05/2004 07:33

Do you also have Mozilla installed? The last time I tried the Flash plug in install, it put the plugin in Mozilla Plug-Ins directory instead of the one in the Firefox directory. I copied the files and then flash worked.

At the office, if I need flash (for those POS websites that require it) I use IE, otherwise I use Firefox w/o flash (it cuts down nicely on ads).

-Zeke