Yesterday (Oct 21, 2015) was the future, at least if you are into cheesy 80 movies. So while we may not have hover boards we do have some other neat things that they didn’t see coming, such as the world wide web. Along with the internet, we also have a bazillion new advertisements competing for our attention each day in the form of banner ads, popups, and video preroll that we must sit through before watching the content we want. Thankfully, there is a simple solution to reducing the amount of advertising that ends up on our digital screens and that is an Ad Blocker.
Adblock Plus
I personally use Adblock Plus. It is free, unobtrusive, and supports every major browser out there. It works a lot like caller ID.
A website, let’s say Example.com, has ads in it. Those ads are fetched from some other server when you load the webpage. ABP, looks at the addresses that the website is trying to load additional content from and determines if it is an ad server or not. If additional content is trying to load from say, http://ads.moreads.ads, then it will stop that. Yay!
In Safari for Mac, my browser of choice, ABP shows as a little icon in the top toolbar.
If you click on the icon, you can manually disable ABP for the webpage that you are on.
Everyone should be running an Ad Blocker. If there is a particular ad supported website that you want to continue supporting (by seeing and clicking on ads) then you can whitelist (disable the ad blocker) for just that website.
Webpages will load faster with an Ad Blocker because you are loading less material.
Content + Ads = Total Webpage
Welcome to the future. It is full of ads, but at least you can turn them off.