Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Firefox with Adblock R.O.C.K.S

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 1.0.6
Current filter (Filterset.G) : 2005-09-05a.txt
Just 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. FlashGot
2. Gmail Notifier
3. Mozilla Archive Format

I 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'!

Additional References:

1 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBlock

------ update ------
I now use AdBlock Plus and am happily subscribed to Filter Von Dr. Evil
More Filters: http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions

6 comments:

Darth Chatri said...

What? So many features, so many options? Man, this must be such a difficult browser to use! And what is this extensions thing? My browser has things in built, I don't need to extend it. Of course, this makes it crawl, but at least things are inbuilt!
And this firefox is just an application damn it. My browser is integrated with the OS. So fast. Sometimes it stalls things and sometimes its a huge security threat, but hey, whats the fun in not rebooting or not reformatting the disk regularly.
And what are all these tab thingies? Everything so well organised in one window? The desktop looks so empty. Look at my desktop, so beautifully cluttered. The fact that I have only one desktop adds to all the beautiful clutter.
And we the users can configure every small detail as they want it, what have the developers done.

In case you are still following this, all the above was *sarcasm* (duh).
Another cool feature - Right Click on a search box (like Google, Wikipedia) and say "Add a keyword for this search".

Anil said...

Good informative post. I am using Adblock from long time and quite satisfied with it. I want such posts from you.

Suhas said...

Also try with flashblock.mozdev.org. It blocks all flash files, and icon is displayed on the page. If you click on the icon then only the flash file is downloaded and played in the browser. It makes accessing some sites more easy as some adds are in flash format.

Kasturi said...

hey thats cool!!!
and thanls for reading my blogs so often!! well i am note really a good poet, but i just like to express myself through the poems...

Darth Chatri said...

You know, Nakul is right. You need to think above IE/Firefox, Windows/Linux. From now on think only about Firefox, Linux ...
;)
On a more serious note, its ok to praise Firefox, but there is no need to belittle IE. Actually, I need to take back comments about IE and Windows, since I haven't used them for years and I have no idea about what state they are in.

The Shaolin said...

> Adblocker has been coming for IE since long.
Hah! I *never* heard of one! IMHO I think you are
talking about 'pop-up' ad-blocker and NOT in-the-page-content
blocker! They are 2 differnet things.


> And for firefox they started coming just now. I think you are trying
> to increase your comments list by posting such _posts_ which are
> "ridicolous" and full of your bias towards _free_ code.
Increasing comments! LOL!
There are more contraversial topics which would draw significantly
*more* visitors/comments!

Initially I took all the snapshots with Firefox: AdBlock enabled and disabled.
But you know, I later scraped it and thought of taking IE's snapshot.
This helps me emphasize on *what* you are missing by *not* having
firefox!!!
And, yeah, of course, I'm a GREAT advocate of 'open' standards
& 'open source'! And I hate M$, for you don't know how it
killed third-party browsers and media-players! And many such
wonder applications! There once was a site that went in intricacies
of how M$ ensures that nothing other than its own applications
run smoothly on windoze. The site is down, but I have the article
somewhere in my archives. Lemme know if you are interested!!!
This does not necessarily imply Windoze is inferior OS, just it
doesn't fit my requirements, and not to forget M$ advocates lots
of evil practices!

> I cant even tell how many times firefox crashes without any reason.
> How many times it just hangs and it needs to killed :P. Giving
> different hotkeys in different versions. Once minimized
> for > 1/2 hr, it will never show up unless it is _killed_ and reopened.

I keep it open through whole night, when I'm not at office.
And the next morning, BANG! There it is ready for my service!!!
I think you are mistaken and *really* talking about IE!!!
It is IE's FREQUENT crashing that forced be to look for
alternative browser. I can bet there are more crashes in IE
than in Firefox. I'm a *heavy* browser and never has my F'fox
crashed!!!
It will take some time for firefox to respond because all its memory
is swapped onto disk (a rough guess) after long period of inactivity,
and hence takes time to restore it in memory. Apart, I think your
base-OS is Win 2K, which by itself explains your crashes!!! On WinXP,
Firefox is 'rock-steady'.
Also check whether you are using Beta or stable release.
I have stable release: 1.0.6.



> (thanx for session-saver plugin)
> This doesnot means firefox sucks.
> start thinkign above all this IE/firefox, windows/linux dude.
> Everything has its own pros-cons depending upon the purpose for
> which it has been built.

That's the point! I should *only* think of Linux & Firefox!
Everything has it's own 'goodies'. And one has to pick what *best*
suits his needs! 'Freedom' is my way of doing things!!! And Firefox
gives me enough of it!
[Thanks to Adi for this line ;-) ]

Thanks for sharing a different perspective on this post!
And yes, no offense intended to anyone, it goes without saying!