My brother recently turned me on to two fantastic extensions for Firefox.
“Firefox extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the browser to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while keeping Firefox small to download.” (Taken from the Firefox extension website)
There are two extensions that I have found to be very nice:
1) AdBlock
2) FlashBlock
These two extensions have helped me rid pages of banner ads and flash-based ads. It’s simple! When you encounter a banner ad on a website, right-click on the ad and choose “AdBlock”.
It will present you with the URI for the ad. It will look something like this:
http://ads.classifieds.com/cnn/ads/00123234-223.2/1223hhhasd/blah
That long string above is where the particular ad is originating. You can block this particular ad, or what I do is the following. I replace the long string above with something like this:
http://ads.classifieds.com/cnn/ads/*
Then I click “Block” after making this change. What this does is that it blocks any ad coming from that cnn classifieds site. After a few days of doing this your web browsing will start to become vacant of ads! This is because there are only a handful of major advertising servers out there. Blocking them will block most of the ads you run into online.
Flashblock, on the otherhand, will replace those eye-grabbing animated flash ads (you’ve seen them….they are the shoot the duck/badger/santa/bug to win a car/ipod/bike/cellphone/giftcard advertisements) with a blank square with a “Flash’ icon. You click the flash icon to activate the flash component. It’s very nice.
I suggest these to everyone who uses Firefox.