Great Firefox add-on: Flashblock
 

I don't mind looking at advertisements on the web. I understand that my favorite news sites need advertising to make it worthwhile to write and publish.

But recently there's been a flood of really nasty, inappropriate advertising, which blocks the text you're trying to read, growls at you when you move your mouse over it, moves and wriggles in ways to catch your attention.

http://cellar.org/2007/flashgot1.jpg

In this shot, the page is just loaded, and the UPS whiteboard guy has blocked part of what I was looking at, and has started his rap. Out loud, at maximum volume. At this point all sane readers are diving desperately for the "X close" button to click on. (It never looks the same, so you have more trouble finding it.)

These ads are written in Flash, a technology from Adobe which lets programmers and designers easily develop web tidbits with motion and sound. These new ads are worse than the much-hated "pop-ups" -- which became one of the main reasons for the general public to switch to using Firefox, a few years ago.

http://cellar.org/2007/flashgot2.jpg

Once again Firefox users win. If you install Flashblock, you'll find that immediately, instead of those intrusive ads, you get an "f" symbol, for Flash.

http://cellar.org/2007/flashgot3.jpg

Flashblock is blocking two Flash ads on the page. Mousing over the top box shows you where the Flash bit will actually appear on the page. It's covering part of the news image... one of those crappy ads.

http://cellar.org/2007/flashgot4.jpg

But if you want to see what you're missing, you just click in the box with the symbol, and the Flash runs, springing the box to life.

The Flashblock add-on works very well, and has not caused any problems in everyday browsing. The one downside is that some sites use Flash for legit purposes -- most notably, YouTube, which uses Flash to present its video window, and MySpace Music, which uses it to produce that window of sampler songs. But that's OK; Flashblock lets you specify domains that are allowed to send you Flash without asking first.

Take back the web, people... use Firefox with Flashblock. This is the Internet, and we are in charge here.

Flashblock is great. I've been using it for over a year now. I've never understood annoyance as a business model and that's what flash ads amount to.

And for IE, here is the ticket: SpyAd. Takes some getting used to - there is no installation interface but its deadly effective. Simply, it adds thousands of domains into IE's restricted list preventing those domains from running any scripts.

I use Firefox at home but IE at work.

And I heartily recommend Mike's list which works for all browsers by using the hosts file to override the DNS map. For those new to the idea, didja ever wonder how when you type cellar dot org that you end up at cellar dot org? Simply, cellar dot org is mapped to a specific IP address. You can override a site name's IP address map by putting in a different IP address. You do that in a file in your PC called 'hosts' (no extension) so Mike put together thousands of notorious advertising sites and mapped all of them to the same IP address: 127.0.0.1 which is the IP address of... your very own computer. Sneaky but it works like a charm.

Additionally for Firefox, I use AdBlock with either the FilterSetG list or Jamie Plucinski's list of sites to block.

I haven't seen an ad or unwanted flashup or popup at home in years. And all my banking and shopping sites work just fine.

Looks like a great program, but it removed all my printers. Could be cause I don't understand all I'm suppose to know about such things. :tinfoil: bb

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Hopefully, you or the program backed up the original hosts file. You need to copy your printer info from the original one into the new one.

Windows is using the hosts file for printers now? Not a day goes buy when I miss using Microsoft®.

I hadn't heard of it doing so, but that's the only way I can think of that you could lose your printers by modifying the hosts file.

Al I know is I had a backup and uninstalled the program from above and my printers were back after reboot??? bb

The best firefox add-on?

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1645/

The only problem I'm having with flashblock is it blocks allot of things I want to see. And I can't turn it off.

Right-click on the little "f" symbol, and click "allow flash from this site". After a few days, you should gave gotten most of the common ones.

(also, just to cover all bases, you do know that you can left-click on the "f" to start the flash in any case.)

Thanks Happy Monkey.

I have intentionally disabled Flash because of the obnoxious Flash advertisements. Thank you for posting this. It will allow me to re-enable Flash for those sites where I do want it, such as youtube.

Broken in FF 2.X.

Another good one is Adblock.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865