OS and browser agnostic ad blocking
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, it’s hard to miss Google’s recent launching of Chrome, a new competitor in the browser market. While trying the browser, I was rudely reminded of how much advertisement is out on the internet. It’s like getting used to Tivo’ing all your shows and suddenly surprised by commercials during a live broadcast.
Either way, I wanted to continue testing Chrome while maintaining a relatively ad free browsing experience. I found my answer in the form of Privoxy.
While the website is of standard geek fare and could probably use an uplift, the installation process is fairly straightforward and it’ll have you blocking most ads within minutes.
This short walkthrough is for Windows users.
- Download the proper .exe file here.
- Run the setup program and accept the default options.
- Setup your internet connection to use the newly created proxy. To do so,
- Go to Control Panel.
- Go to Internet Options.
- Choose the Connections tab.
- Click on LAN settings at the bottom.
- Check “Use a proxy server …” and “Bypass proxy server …”.
- Enter 127.0.0.1 for the address, 8118 for the port.
- Click on Advanced.
- Clear the address and port field for FTP line.
- Click on OK until all the dialog boxes are closed out.
You’re done! You may need to clear the cache and force a clean refresh (ctrl + click on the refresh key or hit ctrl + F5) in the browser, but you should start seeing less ads when browsing now!
Now someone just needs to figure out how to use the proxy to block contextual text ads similar to the Customize Google extension for Firefox.
Update: I just wanted to add that these are only the Windows instructions. If you go to Privoxy’s web site they also have downloads for Linux and OS X available.
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