It doesn’t matter where you go on the web these days, pretty much every site will contain ads of some description, be it banner ads, side bar content ads or popups. Banner ads and sidebar ads never bothered me all that much but popups are annoying. The fact that firefox and IE both include popup blockers shows I’m not alone in that opinion. However there is one more type of ad method that is just as annoying, Adsense.
Google as well as other companies have introduced a scheme whereby website owners can inject ads into their pages as keyword links. Sure the ads may be relevant, but I find the links distracting and the mouse over popups very annoying.
Firefox users rejoice, there is a solution, and blocking ads is not all its good for. Heres a quote from their website:
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.
For example, you could:
I read about GreaseMonkey quite some time back, but could never be bothered to install it, until the adsense ads really got on my nerves and I decided to read up on how to get rid of them. Its a snap.
Visit http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ and click install greasemonkey. Allow the site to install the plugin (see the notification bar at the top of the page) and you’re done. Restart firefox and get some ad blocking scripts installed, which is likewise incredibly simple.
Visit http://userscripts.org/ and find any scripts you’re interested in then just right click on the link to it and select “Install Script”. Job done.
I’ve got the following scripts installed:
There are plenty of scripts to remove ads from other specific websites such as IGN, dilbert etc I have to say I was suprised by how easy GreaseMonkey was to install including installing scripts. Its certainly worth checking out if you have any websites you frequent that are just missing a link here or there, or need something removing. I wonder how long it will be before Google and other websites start changing their methods to stop the scripts working resulting in a cat and mouse game as the scripts are re-updated again.
