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AdSubtract gets rid of ALL of the ads you have described above.

If you use Windows, try AdSubtract. IT ROCKS! Blocks ads, cookies, etc. on a site-by-site basis.

So block them.

"I don't care for all the ads..."

So get rid of them.

AdSubtract

Kills all ads. On a per-site basis. Rocks. :)

• Search images/newsgroups with one click. With IE, I type in a search term and click the image button and voila, I'm searching images.google.com. This might have been fixed recently in Mozdev, but it wasn't the last time I checked.
• Of critical importance is the search word and highlight feature. Often I'll search for something like "Linux sendmail configuration." What comes up? Newsgroup posts, and often several LONG pages of them. I search via the toolbar and then click the "sendmail" button on the right, and IE scrolls down to the first occurrence of that word. Put simply, this rocks. It nearly eliminates the need for Ctrl-F and makes my searches at least 10 times as fast (since I don't have to scroll down manually or Ctrl-F and type in the word again.)
  
• Highlight/PageRank. I don't use these as often as the find word feature, but they're still a consideration. I don't want to switch browsers and lose functionality.

If you are on Windows, check out AdSubtract, which blocks ALL ads from websites. It has a systray icon where you can configure ad, cookie, Java, and Javascript preferences on a per-site basis. Truly a great program (and no, I don't work there.)

As for tabs, try NetCaptor , which I haven't used myself -- but it looks like it adds that capability.

Normally, I'm not a Micro$oft fan in any way -- but I have to admit that IE generally does a better job at rendering the kinds of pages that actually live on the net.

Standards are nice, but if people are already failing to follow them, must we continue to have "nearly as good" or "works if the web author had followed the standard" browsers? What's the point of staying to a "standard" that isn't used? I'd rather be able to READ what's out there.

...try AdSubtract.

Sits in your system tray; works with any browser; kills popups and all other advertisements. You'll be surprised at how much more friendly your browsing experience is.

AdSubtract kills ALL advertisements (even the annoying flying ones.)

How much is your sanity worth?

You can.

What slashdot ads? Oh, maybe its that big emty space I was wondering about between the article and the link to the next article.

With AdSubtract installed I've never see them, nor on any other place. Now to get rid of those horrid flash ads...

get rid of it.

It is beyond me why people complain about ads when they are so simple to get rid of...

AdSubtract

You're welcome.

I totally agree with your comment that most people don't care, and that it makes the movies and games (and TV shows) more realistic. However, sometimes, (rarely?) these things pay off.... Remember what happened to Reeces' Pieces when it was in the move ET (see this story about the effect)? Yikes, everyone was eating those things! (And since the 20th anniversary of ET is going to yeild its re-release on 3/20/02, so we may have to endure it all over again!)

There are about 18,000 programs that you can use to kill the banner ads. I use AdSubtract, but it's Windows-based. WebWasher is a free Windows-based utility as well... there are tons of others for your OS of choice. Why don't you try being proactive instead of just bitching?

Proxomitron should let you do this as well, but the configuration is a little more complex. OTOH, it can do a whole lot more and it's cheaper :)

I don't want any of the ads, so I use Bugnosis to detect the web bugs and the free WebWasher proxy with IE to scrub out the cruft, which is somehow available for free on Linux, though I'm told that Squid and Junkbusters can do the same. AdSubtract is another alternative that comes packages with the ZoneAlarm firewall these days, but I found it to not be as flexible as WebWasher. Unfortunately there are a few sites that do not work with WebWasher, most notably EBay and no matter how I tell it not to touch EBay's cookies and content, it still blocks something that keeps that site from working.

What is needed is some sort of plugin that works directly with the browser, sets all pages and cookies to be filtered out by default, and which lets you just right click on a page to tell it this site is OK to not filter and remember to let these cookies through. All browsers have the cookie feature, but management is usually a pain with what they provide and often left up to third party tools like all of the above. Sounds like Mozilla has some of this built it, so I'll give it a try...it may be time to make a switch. IE6 is supposed to have some of this cookie control, though I'm not sure if it's to that level of convenience.

I haven't seen an ad or a web bug on pages since I've made that change. I look forward to being popup/under and ad free in the future.

There are also some ad-supported sites I visit regularly and want to support, whose ads I don't mind seeing.

Now, I don't work for any ad-blocking company, and I've tried several products (as I said). However, my current blocker seems to work pretty well. I'm currently using AdSubtract, from adsubtract.com. After using it for a few months and occasionally trawling my cookies for more customization, I've been browsing with almost exactly the right amount of popups--ones that I WANT to see!

If youre running windows, a nice solution is Popup Killer. Works great, combined with AdSubtract

You don't need Popup Killer if you're running AdSubtract 2.11. You can configure it to kill anything on either a global or per-site basis, including popups, java applets, javascript, animations, cookies, background images, auto-refreshes, background sound, referrers and of course, ads of all shapes and sizes. I think I've seen two X-10 ads in the last months and maybe 10 odd-sized banner ads and that's it. The 'Net is actually usable again with AdSubtract! (No, I don't work for them or have any financial interest in them--other than the $29 or whatever it was that I paid them for it). There's a German product called WebWasher that's free, but a little trickier to configure.

I use AdSubtract, and I'm very happy with it. They have a free and a "pro" version, and it is good at knocking out popups and banner ads..

I use it for the cookie-blocking, but the ad-blocking is a nice side effect. I let ads through for those sites that I regularly visit and aren't riddled with seizure-inducing 150x600 pixel monstrosities. Hmm... come to think of it, only four sites I visit these days even fits into that category!

It keeps stats. I block about 300 cookies, 40 popups, and 700 ads over the course of a day.

I use adsubtract on my windows box. Not only does it block the ad server requests, it blocks the cookies as well.


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Jakob Nielsen has been saying that ads on the net don't work since 1997. And he's right.

Furthermore ad stripping software like Adsubtract stop your browser from even asking for the ads.

It's only matter of time until people realize that those banner ads are sucking down the bandwith on their poor 56k modems. Once they find they can surf faster without the ads, it'll spead faster than All-Advantage...
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AdSubtract. Friend, teacher, secret lover.

At work (Windows) I use InterMute (now "AdSubtract") and at home (Mac) I browse with iCab. I haven't seen an ad on the web in weeks...

But beyond amusement, this wouldn't serve much purpose IF you could pull it off. On a large enough scale, it might amount to a form of protest, but why? Okay...Doubleclick has become the poster child of the profiling evil empire. And now Coremetrics has received the brunt of the privacy policy ignorance of its clients, putting the spotlight on third party data-mining. In either case, cookies represent an essential tool to get their jobs done. If you don't like it...your options are simple:

• Configure your browser.
• Use a local proxy or filter. Adsubtract is a good one. I like Proxomitron.
• Use a browser "companion". IDcide works well. It's free.
• Use a proxy service that manages cookies like Privada or Freedom (yep, sneaking my affiliate ID in that URL). Zapada is a clever Java applet approach to keeping Doubleclick et.al. out.
• Periodically clean out your cookie files, either manually or using any number of file tools like Webroot's WindowWasher.
• Just install Doubleclick's opt-out cookie. I've assembled the URLs in one convenient location at http://webveil.com/optout.html.
• Or physically edit your cookie file/directory to be read only...after installing the cookies you want in order to get personalized service...like here at Slashdot.

The Junkbuster proxy is good on *NIX, but the NT version is way too slow and doesn't do well handling multiple simultaneous page requests. (I know, that's tantamount to admitting that I use NT , at least at work...)

For Windows use, I find AdSubtract works better.