One thing I despise on the Internet is ads. This is the reason I watch TV less that an hour a month (that's right!) and that's the reason I quit listening to the radio altogether. I can't stand that they violate my privacy and rob me of choice. I prefer much better alternatives, such as movies on DVDs/tapes, and music on CDs. When I called CableVision today they wanted to know why I wanted to cancel most of my cable services with them. One of the reasons is I don't trust news companies. They discredited themselves and stepped in s*** during the major action in Iraq by feeding us biased, one-sided information. Hypocrites like Linda Vester (who always makes an overly sad face on any issue at all) have no credibility and deserve no trust. For the first time people fled to the Internet to get news more often than they visited CNN.com or BBC.com. I think it's a really neat phenomenon! So what does it have to do with the Internet?
Internet browsing is infested with ads the exact same way. From simply static images to sophisticated Flash it's all the same: the nagging, flashing, annoying online commercials. Much to my delight I discovered an extension for Firefox called Adblock. It allows you to block image and iframe ads, as well as block all images from certain cites. The best part is you can set a wildcard on some sites that are notorious for being cheap ad spitters, and see nothing from them again. You can also import and export filters which potentially opens up a door for assembling a list of known offenders and sharing it. The extension takes the offending element out of the page which on some sites distorts pages (weather.com, for example), but most sites look just fine.
What about the IE side of things? Well, maybe there is a plug-in somewhere out there, but I detest BHOs. I've written quite a few COM servers in C++ over the past couple of years, and this is something I wouldn't want to do again. BHOs have earned enough distrust to stay away from them. They are a pain to write, a pain to uninstall, and once you deploy them they have unlimited ruling over your machine. This is the nature of COM (still). BHOs and spyware have become pretty much the same thing in my mind. To the contrary, Mozilla has far more extensions that IE has ever had and will ever have. They are much easier to manage than BHOs.
The point I'm trying to make in this rant is give Adblock a try. I wonder if it would be a good idea to collect a list of filters and share it with each other. It's only a text file, really. What do you guys think?
