Does anyone remember what the internet was like before it was littered with ugly, intrusive advertising on every page?  If you’re tired of banner ads blinking, daring you to click on them, warning you about things you never thought were problems with your computer, there’s hope for you.

As I’ve mentioned before, Firefox is a great alternative to Internet Explorer for browsing the web for a lot of reasons.  One reason it’s becoming so popular is because there’s lots of little "Add-on" programs that work with Firefox.  One of these "add-ons" is called Adblock Plus and it does exactly what the name implies.  It blocks every ad it comes across and it updates it’s list of things to block every time you start Firefox. 

Let’s take a look at how to get Adblock Plus working on your computer..

Get Adblock Plus

1. You have to install Firefox on your computer.  You can download the program at http://www.getfirefox.com.
2. After you’ve installed Firefox, fire it up (that means start the program).
3. Go to the Adblock Plus page on the Firefox site - here 
4. Click the "Install" button on that page
   
5. A window will open asking you if you want to install Adblock Plus.  Click the "Install" button on that window.
   
6. After it’s done installing, you’ll have to restart firefox, so close it down and fire it back up again.
7. When you restart Firefox, you’ll be asked to pick from a list of servers for Adblock Plus to subscribe to.  This is not some sort of paid subscription, this just means "Where can Adblock Plus get the list of things to block from?"  I just choose the "EasyList" server and that has worked fine for me.

Browsing with Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus will install an icon somewhere on your toolbar.  It has two different looks.

When Adblock looks like a stop sign, it means that it is "On", and ads are being blocked for whatever page you are looking at.

When Adblock Plus is "Off", it looks like a circle.  This means it’s not blocking any ads for the page you’re looking at.

 

You can tell Adblock Plus not to block ads for certain pages, or even entire sites by using the little arrow next to the icon.  Clicking on this arrow will show a menu.  To keep Adblock Plus from blocking ads for the page that you’re looking at, click the "Disable on this page only" item.  To keep Adblock Plus from blocking ads for the entire site you’re looking at, click the "Disable on  (name of site here)" item.

You may be asking "Why would I ever want to turn ad-blocking off.  Well as unfortunate as it may be, there are some sites that you just can’t browse with Adblock doing it’s thing.  Any video site that feeds you commercials between videos will not work correctly.  For example, NBC puts full episodes of shows like "The Office" and "Heroes" on the NBC.com website for you to watch for free.  But they show you commercials several times during each video.  If Adblock is "On", it will block the commercials, and you’ll never get to watch the show because the website will just sit there and do nothing.

So anytime you come across a page that doesn’t seem to be working right, you can simply disable Adblock for that page and refresh the page ( press F5 in Firefox ).

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Once you’re up and running you’ll notice that the internet looks a lot cleaner.  Here’s just one example with a before and after picture.

 

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Programs, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.