AdBlock 0.3 Available for Mozilla FirebirdMonday June 9th, 2003mrtech writes in with news about a new version of AdBlock, the image filtering add-on for the Mozilla Application Suite and Mozilla Firebird: "AdBlock 0.3 has been released for Firebird. The interface has also been updated and it's now a Firebird extension. The great thing is that AdBlock doesn't have to be reinstalled after installing the daily builds because it's a user level extension." A 0.3 version for the Mozilla Application Suite is in the works. There's a great sample userContent.css on Firebird Help that is more comprehensive. I do not see why both the built-in image blocekr and add ons like this concentrate on images always. What Mozilla really needs is an option to suppress any network connection to a list of URI regexps. This would suppress ad images from the same server as "good" images (usually kept in different dirs), flash ads, iframe ads and other forms of ads for a while. Of course, once the web sites get really desperate to show us the ads, they will simply shell out *any* web page as a couple of hashcode.html, hashcode.jpg etc files - and what we do then, I dont know :) Feel free to implement what you just described -- this is what nsIContentPolicy exists for.... We may need to add some ShouldProcess calls and ShouldLoad calls in plugin code, but after that it's up to the content policy implementation to decide whether to load the content. I am already disgusted that PC magazine now charges me money for their utility library. That X-drive and StorageVault deleted my files (with warning luckily.) rather than simply reducing storage capacity to say "5MB" and having inactivity limits. I used to get annoyed by advertising. Now I fill out the target sheets.. because if an ad is actually relevant, I'll click on it. No, I don't work for the advertising companies. I believe they learned their lesson from the double click fiasco. Thanks to dynamic technologies, ads are becoming more interesting (My dad and I "play" the Orbitz ones. And yes, I remember the brand name, and sometimes the game triggers an accidental click. They are ingenious ads.) Of course, they are pop-ups, so I don't see them when I surf with Mozilla based browsers. (because websites need to use positioning to make windows pop up and go away, or use frequency protection. What we really need is a friendly pop-up that closes some other pop-ups so that the total pop-ups (of course that wouldn't work with Mozilla, because scripts are not allowed to close windows they did not create. <sigh>. Maybe I like all ads except pop-ups. Is that so wrong? ads keep things free.. they really do. sometimes, that's not even enough. But it allows sites that choose to to maintain a basic free version and still make some money on premium features or at least break even. Sam Maybe this is a bad parallel to make, but when I am watching a movie, I find it annoying when an ad (or news bulletin) starts scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Even more annoying is when a newscast takes up half the tv screen with their message making it almost impossible to concentrate on the original broadcasting. I concede that putting ads on a web page isn't as bad as this, but when colorful, busy animations and scrolling text permeate a web site, I choose to remove them. I don't mind static ads, but I'd have to believe that most people that use AdBlock are fed up with punch-the-monkey ads that annoy and interfere with viewing the desired content from a website. You can get rid of the symptoms of your annoyance much more easily. I agree. I hate the ads that loop at a very high speed. So I only allow them to loop once. Not only can you control if images are allowed to animate, and how many times.. but you can also just press the stop button. The animations will cease. The scrolling Marquee isn't even standard HTML, and can and should be disabled--instructions are at Firebird Help. I think that Mozilla strikes the right balance with what it chooses to build in. Sam google and k5 should be commended for their non-obtrusive text ads, and salon's "view one big add to get a premium pass for hte whole day" idea is wonderful. there are other ways of making money than slamming your readers with popup adds and animated images embeded in the text that make it impossible to read the page like this one i actually foudn in the wild: http://eds.org/~joschi/web_ads_suck.gif ... trying to make money like that is a dead end, and mozilla is forcing the content creators to be more.... creative in how they make money. terrrific. hmm. AdBlock and the userContent trick just make the banners "invisible".. they are still being loaded and everything. so I guess the webmasters still get their cash if it's some pay-per-view and not pay-per-click stuff ;) (and no one clicks on an ad anyway, so they dont lose anything with these methods ;) Have tried the Mozilla version (why is there no current version for Mozilla?) and it did not work - not at all with the sites I tried. I also think that merely trying to hide the ad instead of preventing the download is pretty useless - I do not want these ads to be used for clicktracking and I do not want to wait for them when viewing a page - both is not prevented when merely hiding it. When is AdBlock going to actually block ads, ie. not download them? Soon, I hope. At the moment, my excuse for not getting this to work is bug #162044. The bug prevents the only way I've been able to find for blocking downloads from actually working. Please mail the list if you have suggestions for alternative ways of blocking downloads. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162044 link to mentioned bug This hosts file blocks tons of ads. Much easier than using add-in programs. http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html havent tried this for a while, but doesnt this cause mozilla to wait for a long time for all these blocked hosts? And of course this will not help to block ads from one directory on the same host you want to browse other stuff. but i have webserver (for development) running on my box, so it just instantly gives a 404... so i see a lot of pages (like nytimes.com) that have ad-iFrames that just have the unobtrusive 404 page instead of some blinking .gif :) All of these hosts only server ads so they are safe to block. If you are worried about hangs you can always run a web server on your local machine or change the IPs (except for localhost) to point to another web server. I point mine to an IP on one of my servers that serves a blank gif for every request. Read here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=63478&cid=5908024 i do host name blocking, but adblock is good because it lets you block, for instance, slashdot's banners which are hosted on the same server as all the other slashdot images, so blocking all of those is unpleasent... adblock lets you only block images that have /banner/ in their path, or whatever you want. pretty cool, i've been wanting this for ages. Johann, you'll want the mozilla-specific build: homepage.mac.com/rue/Adblock Cheers. bad_mofo, i tried out the mozilla-specific 0.3 build at your site, but it broke adblock on my machine (w2k, mozilla 1.3). i ended up deleting my c:\program files\mozilla.org\mozilla directory and re-installing. AdBlock only hides or removes images. If you want mozilla not to download an image in the first place AdBlock needs to find a way to integrate with the "image permissions" in Mozilla. The file cookperm.txt in the profile directory contains those permissions. http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/ad_blocking.html Hosts file on the other hand allows you to block the entire server thus saving bandwidth (more so for people with dial up connections). http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ I use both. On interesting thing is that many of the spyware related software will empty your Hosts file and delete the AdAware version upon installation. I wonder if making the Hosts file a read only file will be of any help. A nice application to manege the Hosts file is called "Hostess" http://accs-net.com/hostess/ The website http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ also has an option to have the file in the Mozilla cookperm.txt format http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=cookperm&showintro=0 I have to say that I am impressed with the new version. One small thing I noticed is that the toolbar grippy doesn't hide the toolbar, but everything else works like a charm! Thanks!! PLEASE... someone listen up! What do we have to do to get a Classic OS9.x version of Firebird for Macs. My browser options are dropping to nothing for choices just because I don't run OS X... come on! I'm not the only one... Hey- I'm the developer for the Mozilla-version of AdBlock. As an os9-primary user, I'm in the same position: stuck on a Jan 22, 2003 nightly build of 1.3b. Until now, I haven't seen any compelling reason to transition to X. But, with g5's just around the corner, WWDC may turn me yet. In the meantime, you can most definitely run AdBlock under Mozilla 1.3 on os9. ...and since you posted to the AdBlock thread, I'm sure that's all you needed to know. :P The version below is superior to the official Firebird release. Enjoy: link :: homepage.mac.com/rue/Adblock -rue |