Almost anyone who uses the web regularly can tell you about sites that have become so overloaded with ads, pop-ups, etc. that the actual content gets buried. Often those sites are providing useful information, but it's difficult to wade through all the extraneous junk.
Fortunately there are ways to significantly improve your browsing experience. Here's my step-by-step guide.
1) If you are using Internet Explorer or any version of Netscape as your web browser it's time to switch. They are outdated, bloated, and/or full of security holes that could compromise your computer. If you are using Safari (Apple's web browser) I still recommend switching. Mozilla Firefox is the fastest, safest, and most feature-filled browser around. Get Firefox Now!
2) While Firefox does an excellent job of blocking most pop-ups, some sites have found a loophole to get around the blocker. The loophole involves using Macromedia's Flash Player to pop the windows up. To close the loophole, follow the instructions found here. With just those two steps, most average users will find their browsing experience to be pretty good. But if you're a power user, read on!
3) Now that we've eliminated the pop-ups, it's time to turn our attention to ads within the webpages themselves. This is where we bring out the power tools. In our case the power tools are in the form of plug-ins to Firefox. Plug-ins are extensions which enhance the Firefox browser. The first one we are going to install is AdBlock. To install, simply go to the site, click on the install link, and then click on the most recent development build. Firefox may block installation (a security feature). If so, click on the "blocked" message to add the site to the list of allowed install sites, and then retry the install. Once the install is complete, you will need to restart Firefox.
As the name implies AdBlock is designed to block ads, except it's quite a bit more precise than the pop-up blocker. You set up filters to block information coming from sites that are doing the advertising. This works pretty well since a lot of the advertising on the net comes from maybe a couple dozen sources. Filtering is done based on the URL of the advertising images. This does involve a bit of work since the filters have to be set up. There are a number of preset filters that you can use right away. Most of them use standard cues within the URL that indicate ads (i.e. the names of advertisers like "doubleclick" or things like "adserver"). Searching google for "adblock filters" should yield a number of useful filter sets. I prefer to set them up as I go based on the sites I visit. When I see an ad, I simply right click on it and choose "Adblock Image" (or better yet "Adblock IFrame" if it exists) from the drop down list. Adblock then shows the URL of the ad. Usually it will be something very long like this: "http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/N2502.espn.com/B1517698.3;sz=728x90;...blah,blah". The thing is that 90% of time, you don't need to worry about the stuff after the site address. So you can simply delete everything after that, and replace it with the wildcard "*". Once you have changed the AdBlock image URL to something like "http://ad.doubleclick.net/*" just hit ok and poof, the ad disappears. And you wont see any other ads from that site either! Now you have to be a little careful, as sometimes sites may serve ads and other images from the same server. In that case the directory structure can be important. For example if the ad URL was "http://images.yahoo.com/ad/xyz?abc/image.jpg" it is possible that non-advertising images could be coming from the same server (images.yahoo.com). In that case, look for the cue (the "/ad" directory) and when AdBlock-ing change the URL to "http://images.yahoo.com/ad/*" just to be safe. If you make a mistake, no problem, under the Tools menu there is now an AdBlock submenu where you can set your preferences. This includes examining, in detail, all the filters you have set up and changing preferences (to get rid of the Adblock tabs for example). Also in the bottom right of the browser window there is an Adblock link which shows all the elements of the current page and which (if any) of those are being AdBlocked. This is helpful to figure out if you accidentally blocked stuff you didn't mean to block. It doesn't take very long to get the hang of using AdBlock, and as you setup more filters it just gets better and better. Sometimes you don't realize how much it gets used until you sit down at a browser that's not AdBlocked!
Firefox and AdBlock are a powerful combination indeed. But there are even more powerful tools that let you truly customize your browsing experience to avoid clutter and integrate content in a way that is nothing short of amazing. We'll be talking about those in Part 2 of this article. Stay tuned!