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There are lot of boring and annoying ads and banners on websites which you wished were not there but could not do anything about them. Besides being annoying they often take longer to download than the rest of the the page. Adblock Plus gives you the power to get rid of these ads.

What is Adblock Plus?

Adblock Plus is an add-on (software module that supplements or enhances the original unit it is adding on to) for
Firefox browser which allows you to get rid of text, banner, flash and image advertisements from any website.

But where can I get Firefox?

How well has this add-on been received?

It has been a year now since Adblock Plus was released. Since then there have been almost three million downloads on addons.mozilla.org (which is very good!).

Before and After

The pictures below show the same site before Adblock was activated (left) and after Adblock was activated (right).

How does it work?

Install it on Firefox and restart the browser. You can choose to let it sit on your status bar or toolbar.

You visit a site and you see some annoying banner ads. Right click on any of the banner ads you do not want to see and say “Adblock ..”. The banner would be gone and won’t appear next time you visit the site.

It might be tricky to block flash and java content on a page as you cannot right click to get the “Adblock menu”. For such cases, Adblock Plus has an option called “Show tabs on Flash and Java”. It displays a button saying “Adblock” at the upper right (lower right if there isn’t enough space) corner of every object. Clicking this button will block the object.

You can also use the Adblock Plus sidebar to see all the elements of the page and block the banners from there.

You can use filters with wildcards or even regular expressions to block complete banner factories.

(As per the rule in the image above, anything which has a url starting with http://servedby.advertising.com/ will be blocked.)

You can choose to disable Adblock Plus for the sites where you do not want it to work. (refer to the image above)

Adblock Plus comes with a built in list of filters (rules for filtering advertisements) which allows it to take care of blocking ads right out of the box. This list is continuously updated and you have an option of manually or automatically getting the update list.

It is advisable to update the list once in a while as new advertisements keep coming and this default list is a good way to keep them away.

Where can I find more information about Adblock Plus?

Adblock Plus has a dedicated site here and can be downloaded from here. They have a nice FAQ section and a blog dedicated to Adblock Plus.If you have any questions you can ask questions on the forum.

NOTE: If you experience CRASHES ON YAHOO MAIL, please read http://adblockplus.org/en/npYState for a solution.

I believe ads should not hinder or get in the way of the user experience but definitely everyone does not think so. You need to have a tool like Adblock Plus to create a nice user experience for you. It is tool worth trying.

 

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