I’ve turned into a *big* fan of AdBlock for Firefox. Clearly the most useful tool of them all. Get rid of ad images, javascript, and flash animations. I find the administration of all the banning information easy enough, once you identified the offending URLs. This could in theory be tricky (are presented a list of all image, script, and flash URLS) but in practice it is not. I guess that if you can’t identify the ads from looking at the list, chances are that finding a pattern to block them won’t work either.
#Software
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AdBlock is addictive. I was not using it because I believe it’s fair enough for a site to propose its content for free in exchange for me viewing a few ads. One day though I was so angry at lemonde.fr which adds at least 2 flash animations (one being a movie with sound and all) to each page that I installed this extension.
I am now allways happy to find a site with a little counter or a small gif that is not allready blocked by my filters.
Though I think it should be easy to come up with something a little more clever to create the urls for the ads than what is used now (ie _ads_xx.swf) in order to make the creation of filters a lot more difficult.
– PierreGaston 2005-09-19 13:46 UTC
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I tell myself that if I’m not going to click on the ads, there’s no problem in me blocking them. On StefanKrempl’s site, for example, has ads for his books, and I might buy one of them sooner or later. So I left the ads. What I really hate is animation. They are terribly distracting; using them for visitors is bad usabilty.
– Alex Schroeder 2005-09-19 21:51 UTC