6 April, 2006

Block ads with Adblock

According to the BBC, major UK media companies are moving away from charging for web content, instead deriving income from display advertising.

This would probably be an appropriate opportunity for me to mention one of my favourite Firefox extensions, Adblock. This filters web pages as they load, removing all adverts. Yes, all of them. Imagine browsing without banner ads, AdSense text blocks, etc. That's how I see the web all the time. The advertising content is simply ignored, so 99% of pages look as if they were never meant to include ads – there are no ugly and equally distracting gaps or broken images. Firefox itself eliminates pop-up ads, of course.

Adblock works by matching content to a blacklist. To save the effort of training your own, download the latest Filterset.G, a collectively-derived pre-populated blacklist.

I presume the advertisers and host site owners still benefit from serving the ads, which is fine with me, so long as I don't have to see the ads! The providers won't get any clickthrough revenue, though. Tough.

Since I last looked, Adblock seems to have been adopted by Mozilla (as opposed to being developed by an independent individual), which might be considered an indication that it could become incorporated into the core product eventually.