Every few weeks I'm going to be writing a little article about cool features in Mozilla Firefox, my new best friend. This week I'm going to talk a little bit about extensions.
As you know, IE can't manage it's plugins at all. You can get all these spyware/adware apps injected into your browser with no way to know they're there and no easy way to get rid of them. And there really aren't many useful plugins for IE, since the browser code is extremely inflexible.
Enter Firefox.
Firefox manages plugins (but calls them extensions) easily and neatly. From the Tools menu, just click extensions to see a list of installed and active extensions. Today, we're going to be talking about AdBlock.
AdBlock is a FireFox extension that doesn't come with the browser, but should. It's a very powerful advertisement disabling tool that stops the advertisements from loading entirely rather than only stopping them from being displayed on the page. This saves a ton of bandwidth. FireFox will also flow the pages around the ads, if it can, treating the code like the ad was never there.
For starters, get FireFox. Then go here and download AdBlock. After restarting your browser, you're good to go.
Let's say you see a page that only has Google ads on it. Sure, Google ads are the tamest and friendliest of ads on the internet, but they're still ads! We need to get rid of them!
Here's what you do:
Right click on the Google ad.
Select AdBlock IFrame.
Replace the URL it gives you with this: http://*.googlesyndication.com/*
Congratulations! You've now seen your last Google advertisement ever.
You can do this for any ad: image, flash, or iframe. Just play around with your asterik (*) placement to block entire ad servers. This is a very powerful, lean, and time-saving tool that makes me love FireFox just that much more. Get it!
[Firefox Fun] - Screw Google!
[Firefox Fun] - Screw Google!
Last edited by Jeff on 2004.07.19 8:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I do what I can.
Here you go. So far it's worked pretty well for me.
(replaced: just use http://datatiki.com/adblock.txt to stay updated)
(replaced: just use http://datatiki.com/adblock.txt to stay updated)
Last edited by Jeff on 2005.05.04 11:41 pm, edited 3 times in total.
I do what I can.
The first time I actually used Firefox was on a Phlak disc. I love it. I just wish I could get the address bar in my XP taskbar to treat it with a little more respect.
I'm slow to accept change, but once I do, I generally embrace it.
And it's not my first time enjoying open source free software. I love phpBB, and that goes back to what you were saying in another post about online apps.
I'm slow to accept change, but once I do, I generally embrace it.
And it's not my first time enjoying open source free software. I love phpBB, and that goes back to what you were saying in another post about online apps.
I do what I can.
Updated Ablock list.
Here's my current Adblock list. I'll keep a downloadable version up here once I get the site layout set, but for now, this'll do.
It's probably a good idea to have the ieview plugin for Firefox, since the list might be too restrictive for some sites, and may cause them not to display correctly. This is really rare, though.
(replaced: just use http://datatiki.com/adblock.txt to stay updated)
It's probably a good idea to have the ieview plugin for Firefox, since the list might be too restrictive for some sites, and may cause them not to display correctly. This is really rare, though.
(replaced: just use http://datatiki.com/adblock.txt to stay updated)
Last edited by Jeff on 2005.05.04 11:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I do what I can.
One of my favorite features of Firefox is Livebookmarks. I would assume that most of the techies here use them already but for those of you who dont they are really cool. What live bookmarks consists of is a built in RSS reader that adds the post titles to your books marks or conveinently docks on the left bookmarks pane. If you visit a live bookmarkable page an orange icon will appear in the lower right hand corner of the screen which you can click on to subscribe to the RSS feed.
"...I always tell my friends that if its in the news we dont have to worry about it because it rarely ever happens, thats what makes it news. Its when something is not in the news anymore that we have to start to worry" - Philip Greenspun
. I just want the experience of making one from scratch in PHP.
I'll always have an updated copy of my adblock list at http://datatiki.com/adblock.txt
I do what I can.
I suppose some simple instructions wouldn't hurt either. To import my list, first, save it to your computer somewhere. Then go to the Tools menu in FireFox, click on the Adblock menu, and click on Preferences. In the Adblock window, click Adblock Options, then Import Filters. Find my adblock.txt and select it. If you have your own list started, hit cancel to just append my list to yours. Otherwise, click OK, and you'll always be one step ahead of pesky ads.
I do what I can.
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