Ad blocking with Mozilla
I've referred to the Mozilla project fifty five (56 now) times on this site in the past, because for me it's the most exciting cross-platform OS application that has successfully reached a mainstream audience, even if it's market penetration has been relatively slow. I know that most of you reading this are using Internet Explorer, by choice or not, and am hoping that by now those of you who are, have thought up a defence for your brain-dead decision ;) - if so I'd love to hear it.
Anyway, this week I've re-discovered probably one of the most under utilized features of the Mozilla browsers, despite having mentioned it here before: Ad Blocking.
There's nothing more annoying that a flashing banner ad placed smack-bam!! right in the middle of an article you were trying to read. Nobody likes banner ads. So having applied the multiple ad-blocking techniques described by Blogzilla, I've decided to provide the following quick demonstration: a before and after scenario of a randomnly-chosen *wink* MTV.com article page.
Gaming site IGN.com is also notoriously bad for it's ads - you have to see a huge ad even before entering the site (it will cost you to disable it), while upon entering you're faced with a horde of ads and popup windows. See the before and after.
It works just as well on other sites: CNN.com before and after if you're still not convinced.
Using a personalised userContent.css file (based on this one) and by enabling the other ad-blocking preferences, Mozilla successfully hides all banner ads from displaying.
It's ridiculous that websites offer it's users, who unfortunately don't know any better, the chance to remove banner ads as an incentive to subscribe to their services, when Mozilla does just that at no cost: it gives it's end-users the power and control to personalize how they experience the web.
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15 Comments
I guess I wasn’t clear enough, I wanted to exclude Linux by saying “piece of software”. I’ve reworded now.
Nice. :)
…just for the record, my default browser is mozilla firebird, and i’d use thunderbird for pop mail as well (as opposed to OE) but it doesn’t support multiple identities as yet…
Yes MOZILLA is the Browser Of Power. Dam’s you turned me dude. As for mail programs, and I know I am going to regret saying this (I predict some needless comments from EUDORA geeks) but, MS Outlook is the only way to go. Provided you have an MS Exchange Server. Without the SVR it is just a pretty average program. (Not Outlook Express, please no, we all can agree on how crap that is I’m sure)
Great. It’s Chris’ comment on the whole open-source thing. Go away Chris…
I use IE6 and Outlook. I never did like the feel of the old Netscape (and have used IE since v2.0), and thus do not like the feel of Mozilla. I have tested out both Mozilla and their mail client extensively and have found them lacking. Usually it’s the most arb of things which tend to grate the most, and the list of nice things that Mozilla doesn’t do got too large (such as right clicking an image and saying Show Picture to re-load, or the way Mozilla mail handles it’s address books, etc), but it also lacks the tight feel that comes from an item of software created with many $$$’s behind it.
I’ve never needed to use a “Show Picture” option in Gecko browsers, if an image exists on the server Mozilla will render it otherwise it will show the alt text (for accessibility) instead of an ugly box with a red cross in it. IE’s “Show Picture” option is there so if you have pictures turned off under accessibility options you can still display them at will.
I’m not a fan of Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird myself, but Thunderbird itself is only sitting at version 0.3 and is improving with every new release.
To each his own… but if you fancy shagging Bill Gates up the a$$ each time you load a website, so be it. ;)
I rather like the place-holders…shows if anything didn’t load correctly, and also the Show Picture option is useful for when there was a load error half-way through and you want to just reload that single image instead of the entire page :)
A Challenge to all you MicroSoft slagging open-source lovers. Uninstall Windows and run Linux with Mozilla, until you do that, you can’t be a true follower *grin*
What I’m saying is, IE has a flaw if it doesn’t load the image the first time. Mozilla never has that problem.
You can’t properly compare Microsoft to Linux since the one has been around much longer… anyway not letting this get into another MS bashing debate, thats not what my post was about.
No, it’s not an IE flaw…it’s a server flaw or a connection flaw…like on dial-up when a page load times out. I’ve had page load time outs on all browsers. Mozilla I’d have to re-load the entire page to view one pic, IE I just right-click and reload. I could also control which images I wanted to load. Useful on some sites :)
Each has their own pluses and minuses, and each person should use the one best suited to their needs and way of program use.
*wank wank*
The Netscape 3.x and 4.x browsers simply rocked. There was just something about them that cannot be explained in words. It took me a while to convert, and when I did I went onto IE 6. It took a while to get used to, but it does everything I need for now. To be honest, I’ve installed Mozilla and other than setting up my preferences and opening it to test pages that I develop, I never really use it.
The one thing that irritates me about Mozilla/Netscape 6.x+ is when you want to type an address in the address bar. It’s always niggly and you have to like click it a few times. Other than that, coming from the Netscape 4 days, I love Mozilla.
A few areas where it is light-years ahead of IE:
1) The rendering engine is far superior. It’s visibly a lot quicker!!
2) The tools provided to developers. JavaScript Console & Debugger and DOM inspector are toit features.
3) Popup manager (as Damien touched on)
4) Tabbed-browsing. Once you have use it you can’t won’t go back.
5) Fully standards compliant. IE is littered with CSS bugs.
6) It is still being actively developed while IE has been put on hold until the next major security hole is discovered or Longhorn is released.
And Chris, I honestly can’t believe that you could ever used MSIE 2.0. LMAO, that software was just so lame (thanks to M$ totally missing the surge of the Internet in popularity).
As for email clients, I will probably NEVER use anything other than Eudora. It’s feature rich, intuitive and safe – unlike Outlook Express which spreads spam and virus/worms.
Vaughan, fuck you and your M$ Exchange shite – take off your blinkers and try experience a non-M$ world of standards such as POP3/SMTP/IMAP, not proprietary M$ horseshit!
I remember MSIE 2, it came with the first edition of Windows 95… and it sucked a hole in the atmosphere… …infact MSIE 3 was an improvement, but still Netscape 3 and then later Netscape (Communicator) 4 managed to capture the browser market… it was at this point (and a many months later) that MS brought out MSIE 4 which attached itself to the very thread of your OS with the only way to uninstall being to format your box…
Warrenski: Open Mozilla > Help > For Internet Explorer Users > Location Bar
It’s simply a matter of adapting. I just use the Ctrl+L shortcut.
When Jacques Villeneuve was driving for Williams, he wasn’t earning all that much and still managed to win the driver’s championship.
When he moved to BAR, he got one of the biggest packages in F1 – and hasn’t won a single race! Just goes to show that putting money behind things doesn’t always garuntee a win; money invested isn’t directly proportional to results.
How much money did you say there was behind MSIE again? Open Source is driven by the desire to make good software, while M$ is driven by the desire to make good money. Who do you think would make better software?
Here’s a question for you: if Jacques used Linux and said it was the greatest thing, would you do the same?
BTW: Mozilla’s also awesome because of XUL!
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23 October 2003
warrenski04:56 pm
Personally, I think Linux is the most successful Open Source project. But Mozilla’s good. Yes, I still use IE because it’s there by default, but that doesn’t mean I like it.