Buddies, am back with some sexy & amazingly useful information for you...
[No, but it's not glamorous, so if that is what you stepped in for, feel free to step out]Am here to drive one more nail in M$
Internet Explorer's coffin!!! Firefox has
hundreds of extensions and few are just
out-of-the-world'ly amazing! Amongst a few extensions that I use, I'm going to demonstrate you the power of
Adblock extension.
As the name suggests, you might have guessed by now, its an
Ad Blocker. And works so damn well, that you will experience '
love-at-first-sight'!
If you are as paranoid as me about keeping things
to the point and
clean, you don't want to see anything on a page other than what you intend to see. I find it
insanely irritating when a flash/gif ad dancing VERY conspicuously in adjoining column distracts me from my interesting article.
While
this extension works well just out of the box, geeks can tweak it to suit their needs. Once you install this extension, it allows you to give list of URLs that you want to block whenever a page tries to refer to it. And it goes well beyond it by supporting EXTREMELY powerful Unix-like Regex!!! What else do you need. Besides images, it can block IFRAMEs, scripts, Flash!!! Take my word it works miracles!
What??? You think I'm kidding, okay, let me show you what a difference it makes.
My setup:
Firefox 1.0.6Current filter (Filterset.G) :
2005-09-05a.txtJust import this file into your Adblock extension and BINGO!
I never found a single bit of junk linger on my browser
[smiling SMUGLY]!
Sample 1:Times of India site opened in M$ IE.Click Image and see a column FULL of adverts on the right side.
Now see Firefox with Adblock below! What! You don't see an ad! W.O.W.!(Click Images to enlarge)
Also see list of items Adblock blocked!
Sample 2:ExtremeTech in M$ IE.See Top row, right hand side column, bottom.. nothing but ads galore!
Be sure to check out all images: Image 1, Image 2, and Image 3
See in Firefox now!
Be sure to check out all images: Image 1, Image 2 and Image 3
Holy Shit! is what you just gasped! Isn't it! Not a trace of useless advert![You will notice small side-effect that some useful non-advert images are blocked too! But this is a very small price to pay for what you get]List of blocked items.
One more advantage is, when I'm accessing net from home, where my speed is very limited (modem speed), it saves me much frustration by NOT letting all the ads load before I can read even a line's worth of useful content!Another interesting feature is that you can click on the little 'Adblock' status at the right hand corner of your window and you will see list of items you can block on the current page. All the items already blocked will be listed italicized! You can really improve/tune/tweak your filters over a period of time by adding to list of items to block. Very rarely have I found some useful images being blocked. But in rare event it does happen, then Enabling/Disabling this filter is just a click away, so that's not a problem, at least for me!Other favourite-n-sexy Firefox Extensions of mine:1. FlashGot2. Gmail Notifier3. Mozilla Archive FormatI have used all of these for long enough to vouch by their names!
Please feel free to share your experiences.
LONG LIVE FIREFOX: Browsing Redefined, or should I say:
'Browsing Defined'!
------ update ------
I now use AdBlock Plus and am happily subscribed to Filter Von Dr. EvilMore Filters: http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
