Saturday, May 13 2006, 4:09 PM

Firefox is awesome. Firefox combined with cool extensions is even better. I've been using the Adblock Plus extension for a while, and I certainly dig it. It allows you to filter out advertisements (or other content, if you wish) using regular expressions, or just simple filters. Generally ads don't bother me that much. I've just learned to look around them.

The ones that really bother me are the ones that interrupt the content I'm reading. There are two schemes that drive me bonkers. The first is Google Adwords. People seem to have zero reservation about placing the adword boxes right in the middle of their content, with the exact same styling as the content they're surrounded by. How annoying. The second just appeared recently, and uses a piece of JavaScript to edit the document client-side so that certain keywords appear as links, but are really just advertisements that pop up on your screen as soon as you mouse over them. Since my sight is somewhat impaired, I do the "highlight a line so I know where I'm reading" trick quite a bit, and clicking on one of those keywords is a really quick way to piss me off.

Adblock Plus has given me an avenue to get rid of these annoyances. The following two rules seem to block all of the crap I mentioned above. I wouldn't call them perfect yet, since I've only tested them on a few sites.

The first blocks the Google Ads, and the second blocks the faux-link pop-up ads. Enjoy.

adblockplus annoyances firefox google tips

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