AdSubtract Pro
I have often wondered if part of the reason that internet advertising chocked in 2001 is simply because they became so obnoxious. The advertisers seemed to become more and more desperate for eyeballs that they would show almost anything. Banners ads appeared everywhere, text links seemed to be on every page, and vicious little web bugs crawled on virtually every page.
Like most people, I don't surf the internet for advertisements. In general, I am not waiting for something to pop out of my screen informing me of some new wonderful piece of junk to purchase. I really could not care less what new product some idiot MLM company is trying to get me to buy today and I surely am not interested in internet gambling or pornography sites.
But what's a person to do? Banners, even in these days of reduced internet advertising, are everywhere. Text links proliferate more than ever, and web bugs still poke their little heads out of many pages. Now there are even new, more obtrusive and horrible ads called skyscrapers which are supposed to be even better at grabbing the attention.
You can do what I did and fight back against this scourge of advertising and tracking (the primary purpose of web bugs). You can get a product called AdSubtract. There is a free version and an inexpensive, more full-function PRO version (I prefer the PRO version myself).
An example of the control panel for AdSubtract PRO is shown to the left. In order to show how good this product is, I cleared the statistics, then surfed for a few minutes. I displayed several sites once, just opening their home page. As you can see, in just five minutes AdSubtract took out several hundreds advertisements and web bugs (to AdSubtract these are one and the same). It also removed JavaScript from those pages, and even kept a popup window from annoying me. That's pretty good, in my humble opinion.
The program works by filtering those elements out of web pages that you do not want to see. You have the option of removing Advertisements, cookies, animations, popup windows, Java, JavaScript, You can define a default for all sites, which will be applied, background music and auto refreshes. Personally, by default I remove everything.
Okay, for those pages which require, say, JavaScript you can create special filters. It's very simple and only takes a few seconds. Click or clear the boxes for the elements you want or don't want, exit the browser and restart, and you are set.
Additional Information
- Ad Blocking Banner ads are everywhere, and they take up valuable bandwidth. In addition, they are ugly and distracting. Here's how to remove them.
- Browser Helper Objects Is your system crashing? Perhaps you've unknowingly done what I did - added a Browser Helper Object.
- Web Bugs Web bugs are little graphic images inserted into web pages, emails and other web-aware documents to allow companies to gather information about you without your knowledge.