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Now that the majority of web traffic is HTTPS, Privoxy isn't any better than a DNS-based blocker such as /etc/hosts or Pi-hole.

A proxy works just as well if not better.

I use Privoxy

Hi,

Check out Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/

I've been VERY pleased with it so far, under Windows, OS X and Linux..

It has the one thing that I missed most from the old Opera: Sane/useful tab stacking/grouping built in, with the ability to save and restore such.

Sure, many of you don't care about that, but I do.

At work with the old Opera, I'd create sets of tabs, stacked as I saw fit, for each client and would then save them as profiles named for my clients.

When I got a support call all I had to do was open the saved tab profile for them, and then I'd have EVERYTHING related to them available to me immediately, organized in the way I found most useful to me.

Yes, it took time to set that all up. Yes, it took time to maintain it, but all that time paid for itself, every time I fielded a service call for my customers.

It was an amazingly powerful tool for me, and when Opera dropped it I stayed with the old version until it didn't work anymore.

I looked for similar functionality under Chrome, et al, Firefox and IE but nothing came close.

Vivaldi gave that back to me, and I've switched and will never go back.

It's still very "young", and they are working hard on it. But, they appear to be very motivated and committed.

The current stable release is great, does everything I need, and even better? Since it's multi-platform I get the same basic experience and usability regardless of OS.

While I still use mostly Windows at home, I support Windows, OS X and Linux at work now, and having a web browser that works under all three with the functionality that I want/need allows me to support our users, regardless of OS, without having to switch back and forth between computers

And to bring this back on-topic? Vivaldi is built upon Chromium and still supports the backspace key for going back a page.

The only thing I wish they'd add? Native proxy support, such as Firefox does. I've used Privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/ under Windows for years, and, while the old Opera had its own proxy support, just as Firefox does? Vivaldi doesn't yet, so I have to resort to an add-on for that, since some of the games that I play at home don't support proxies.

Take all of the above for whatever it's worth to you, but I think that Vivaldi is at least worth checking out.

Regards,

dj

If you can't find an ad-block addon, check out privoxy... https://www.privoxy.org/

It doesn't make any sense to me that people block ads in the browser. What's wrong with privoxy? As a bonus, it will block ads everywhere, including Skype.

this https://www.privoxy.org/ looks interesting: I don't knew it [thanks"], and just promoted it to network managers here on my [public sector] company :-)

It always struck me as a bit strange that ad blocking would be implemented as a browser add-on. Do you really want to have your privacy settings undone every time you switch accounts or browsers? Privoxy is a one-click install and it works on all of your browsers.

I can see a new business for add-sinking proxy servers. It would be even better if merged with TOR, so that when browsing through TOR, all bandwidth sapping cruft disappears in a puff of electron smoke.

It's coming from inside the house. http://www.privoxy.org/

And there's an easy way to stop a lot of it, across all operating systems. A proxy server can scrub headers to only allow cookies from certain sources through, for example, and can do the same for outgoing requests. Privoxy is an OLD example of the technology (I was using that thing back in the late 90s). Set up something like that, set up whatever filters you want, tell your browser to use that proxy, and away you go.

Block at the firewall/server.

http://www.privoxy.org/

I've used http://www.privoxy.org/ this for years. No external lists, doesn't look at hosts, works at system, not browser, level and is open source. For desktop only, though.

privoxy does ad blocking and reduces tracking. A different approach.

Easy.

Or use dnsmasq.

Easy.

Privoxy can remove a lot more than just ads served from a given domain/server. It can remove ads served by the same domain/server as the source website, as well as a number of other features that make it pretty nice for speeding up browsing on devices that don't have ad/javascript blockers.

Privoxy

What's an AdBlock?

I use Privoxy instead of AdBlock. It doesn't matter what browser you use. Also blocks some identifying information about your browser / system being reported to the site your visiting, which is nice.

At first, I could just disconnect from the internet to get work done.

But now, since I have to interact with servers on the internet during work, I just set up a proxy which allows me only to connect to the work servers. It's called Privoxy and it can run on windows or linux, and it's easy to enable/disable it.

Hmmm..... can browsers be programmed to reject single-pizel sized images?

No, but with Adblock Plus combined with one or more of the lists, and a good hosts file (look out for apk!), and maybe RequestPolicy, you can eliminate the need to do that. It also helps to use RefControl to defeat HTTP Referrer tracking and Redirect Remover to frustrate that method. Then you also avoid lots of garbage that goes beyond tracking images. For my own /etc/hosts file, I concatenated several popular ones (Google for them) and then uniq'ed the result. It's 1.5MB of bullshit-blocking goodness.

Why do I ruthlessly block all advertisements and make myself difficult to track? Because the moment they try to be sneaky is the moment I lose all respect for them and anything they hoped to accomplish. For me that moment was a long time ago, back when a 14.4 kbaud modem was FAST. This is not an industry that can regulate itself. When an advertiser is especially (more than usually) deceptive, the other advertisers don't speak out against them, complaining that this makes the industry look bad. That means they're giving their silent consent and are equally guilty. So I say fuck 'em. Fuck all of them. I can't support or respect what is not respectable no matter how justified and entitled they think they are.

If you're not using a Gecko-based browser you can always try something like Privoxy. It's related to the old (outdated) JunkBuster proxy if you remember that. The only disadvantage is that full filtering may cost you the ability to see partially-downloaded pages, making your browsing feel subjectively slower. I believe it can do basic ad blocking without this downside, however.

With Privoxy you can block and re-write whatever you please. And I do. 20,131 Google Analytics URLs blocked since August 18th.

Take a look at Privoxy for ad blocking. It is browser independent.

Privoxy. Does more than adblock plus and works with any web browser

Try privoxy: it works with every browser out there, I use it with lynx!

Some friends in Cairo would like to bypass some of the online censorship measures. I've quickly suggested some things (below) to consider overnight. What have I missed?

Anonymous connection:
No:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/help-eff-research-web-browser-tracking

But:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/

Also:
http://www.hotspotshield.com/

And services like:
http://filesharefreak.com/2008/10/18/total-anonymity-a-list-of-vpn-service-providers/
but verify on the ground.

Only if they understand the tradeoffs:
http://www.privoxy.org/
https://techstdout.boum.org/TorDns/

Avoid random lists of anonymous proxies or DNS servers.

To secure the computer:
Use a popular boot disk that leaves nothing behind, e.g.:
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

Remove metadata:
http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=144E54ED-D43E-42CA-BC7B-5446D34E5360&displaylang=en
and similar for other files they may deal with.

Delete/wipe files securely.

Many uses:
http://mailinator.com/
http://www.hushmail.com/

Consider:
http://www.disconnectere.com/
and its analogues

I seem to be on a bit of a Privoxy obsession of late. It comes and goes like a biorhythm. Privoxy goes a long way to help prevent tracking...like tracking by Google, youtube, blogspot, ytimg...oh wait, they're all one and the same.

If you don't want google to store anything about you, just opt out: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/view

If you don't trust them to do what they say, or anyone else for that matter, use privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/

How about Privoxy?

That way you can do *.domain.com or even ads.* or /ads/ filtering.
Hell, it'll even let you rewrite pages in-flight with regex, I use it to strip ads from Hulu and rewrite pages that break when using NoScript.

Combined with an outbound firewall, you selectively force applications to go through the proxy for 'net access.

I could say what I always say about Privoxy. But it never sinks in, so instead here's an amusing link

You can try out privoxy. It is an ad filtering proxy server, which will work with any browser. I don't surf the web without it. Just install it, set your browser to use proxy 127.0.0.1 on port 8118, and voilá, obnoxious ads be-gone.

Most of the time. I'd say you are right but there are exceptions. One example is Privoxy. It'a been nearly the same since the 3.0 release in 2002, but there's been constantly tiny little fixes so it's not abandoned and has had an average 175000 downloads/year not including Linux distros etc. so obviously many people find it useful.

So they're not taking over the world. But is there any point to try to be another jack-of-all-trades software? It does one thing and it does it well, or if you'd want to do it differently you probably need to do it in the browser. Either way there's really no reason to make it part of the same application, this one is "done".

Oh, so you didnt notice all those advertising scripts running in the background on slashtot?

What advertising scripts?

...thanks to Adblock

Blocking ads is one thing, not being tracked anymore is something else. I don't mind targeted ads when they are not annoying but you don't have to track people to be successful in your advertising. For instance, show ads for new games on websites that provide game review or better: ads for divorce lawyers on meetics (Lawl). This doesn't need tracking to be shown to the targeted audience. I see tracking as an offense.

I've spent a lot of time trying tools to protect my privacy: one can try privoxy along with Tor. There are also great add-ons for firefox such as BetterPrivacy and NoScript. There is Ixquick.com (AKA StartPage) which offer anonymous searches, an https proxy access to the search results and they are working on an email service that respects your privacy.

Ad-block is a waste of time. Get Privoxy and stop waiting for crap to download before you block it.

It's not a browser plug-in but otherwise, Privoxy is your friend. Quoting from their home page:
"Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. It has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks."
Enjoy.

Download & setup Privoxy.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ijbswa/files/
http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/quickstart.html

Grab a decent HOSTS file & stick it in your %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\

Alternatively, you can install Spybot & let it's Immunize function generate a HOSTS file for you.

Try Privoxy if you're that poor on bandwidth.

Privoxy is another nice proxy/ad blocker that works well for Windows (and has support for BSD and Linux to boot). The default settings block most ads, and with a few additions to the well documented config file, can be made to block any other sites or images.

I'm currently using Privoxy, which allows domain and URL-based wildcard blocking. It can even rewrite the content of pages on the fly, spoof the user-agent, and remove the "referrer" header. It runs on windows or nix, you can have your DHCP server assign it as the proxy, or you can transparent proxy if you want.

I had used Squid previously, it did the job, but was overkill for the simple blacklisting capabilities I needed.
Before Squid, I had a Windows DNS server, and would add SOA records for bad domains (this was fairly simple through the DNS admin interfaces), I tried doing it on Linux, but it seemed to be more pain that it was worth.
One issue I discovered in the windows solution, was the damn thing was flooding the root DNS servers trying to update the records for the blocked domains (there was a setting to disable this, I don't remember it).

Though I still really wish I had Ghostery and NoScript.

IMO there is no need for them with a good HTTP proxy like Privoxy. Add a bit of Incognito use and a good user.action file, and all is great. I made my own user.action file ages ago from the MVPs.org hosts file, and ever since the world has been good. It's here if you are interested.

Have you tried Privoxy?

NoScript, AdBlock Plus, RequestPolicy and FoxyProxy

Mayne you should learn to do all that the right way, then you can be a real geek and use any browser you like. :)

Use privoxy for all your browsing, in all browsers, on all architectures. Problem solved once and for all.

You should give privoxy a try. Light and non-obtrusive, works beautifully on Linux and Windows alike, and by directing all traffic through it you get consistent results on all browsers.

I use Privoxy. I was thinking more about the poor souls who are still subject to ads.

I did this for a while, but now I prefer privoxy. It's faster, more flexible, and generally easier to set up.

http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/quickstart.html for a quickstart.

For just blocking domains, edit the user.action file and put in akin to this:

{ +block }
www.ad.example1.com
ad.example2.com
ads.galore.example.com
etc.example.com

Sounds like this: http://www.privoxy.org/

Privoxy works very well -- I have been using it and Squid in combination for years.

Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will)

Way back in the IE4 days, I used a mixture of the zone system (Trusted Sites for those few where I wanted Javascript) and the hosts file. These days, if you use multiple browsers then privoxy is the better solution because the one configuration will work in all the browsers (yes, including Internet Explorer).

You can block ads in Chrome with tools such as Privoxy at http://www.privoxy.org/ Works fine for me.

You should check out Privoxy as an AdBlock replacement, it runs as a daemon / service, so it'll work with _any_ browser you use.

Why not use privoxy to block ads globally ?