I hate intrusive advertising as I surf web pages, particularly the Flash ones. I’ve found three easy ways to remove nearly all of these annoyances.
Option 1- The easiest is to use Firefox as as your browser. No excuses, it’s available for most of the popular operating systems – Mac OSX, Linux, Windows… Then install the Adblock Plus add-in.
Option 2 – OK, So you want to try Google’s Chrome Browser. Or just stick with your native OS browser – Safari, Internet Exploder. Then take a look at Privoxy, which is a non-caching web proxy. I’ve installed it on my Netbook running Win XP and now I can surf happily with Google Chrome.
Option 3 – Edit your hosts file to point all the advert serving sites to 127.0.0.1 (localhost). Big job? Maybe, but someone already thought of this and you can download a copy that is regularly updated.
Conclusions – It should be a no-brainer and everyone would run Firefox and choose option 1. But then that would make me sound like M$ thinking we should all be using Internet Exploder. Option 2 seems to perform faster than option 3 as seearching through a large hosts file seems to be a bit of a resource hog on your (Win32) system.
Now if I could only figure out how to stop the annoying ads when I’m listening to the (non BBC) radio!
Quick list of links to these tools:
