For those who don't know, Mozilla-Firebird is the new browser put out by the mozilla team. They have announced that it will get the focus and development as priority over mozilla and it's bloat. One major advantage is that it can use new plugins they called 'extentions'. You can find a list here.

One of them is called AdBlock. It allows you to put in either IP's or host names of ad servers and all images from those addresses/names will be blocked. If you use this along with the built-in option to show only images which originate from that pages' server, most every page will be ad free. You can input them manually one at a time, or input a list from a text file. The bottom of Bob's Block List lists additions for your Windows HOSTS file that looks like:

127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ads.xtra.co.nz
127.0.0.1 ads.zdnet.com
127.0.0.1 ads01.focalink.com

It's a ratather long list and would be time consuming to enter manually. The problem with importing a list is that AdBlock needs a file that lists hostnames ONLY and uses LF (ASCII 10) instead of CR (ASCII 13) to seperate the names. I've written a small (32 lines) program to do the converson. I don't have a place to host either, but if you want a copy emailed, IM'd, or whatever, let me know and I'll send it. I wrote it in qbasic (yeah, remember that?) and compiled it in quickbasic 4.5. The source file needs to be ASCII text and look like the Windows HOSTS file, like the list above. There can be any number of spaces (usually there is more than one) between the localhost and hostname, as long as the localhost is on the left.

The dos executable is 44KB, the source is < 2KB, and a zip of both is 32KB.
Side note, if anyone needs to use QB to do anything (runtime, recompile, etc), I found a copy here. For doing simple things, nobody has come out with anything that can beat it.

good to see you here, tauisgod.

ok, i'm moving this to the Online Security discussion, as i think it belongs there

Also, a good resource for getting ad server lists in many formats is http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/index.php

I think you've given me that link before, it's a very useful page. I've run into one problem using its' list to block ads using the windows host file. Since it's a loop back, browsers will take a very long time before they give up loading an ad. Many times they do not render any HTML, or do not render it completely, until after they give up. Zeroapid.com is a good example of this.

I've gotten the best results from adblocker because it was designed specifically for this, but it won't handle a list as long as yoyo.org has (crashes browser). It will barely handle the one on BBL, but it recovers in a couple seconds. Besides the adblocker, I've also had good results with entering plain IPs into my firewall (sygate), with very few stalls on webpages. It's been a very long time since I had to see annoying thinks like popups ads, and the even more annoying type that slide right across the middle of your webpage.

Try the list using 0.0.0.0, instead of 127.0.0.1, as it should work quicker. Some versions of windows don't like this and can cause the machine to act up (I've seen this on some older version of Win2k), but it's worth a try as it can work much quicker.

Here's a good link for "WWW Privacy Filtering - Block Lists & Misc. Utilities", which also deals with ad-blocking

http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/soft8a.htm

man that site is great, it has everything.

yep hehe. as far as Mozilla this thread is old lol, Firefox is now out (basically a rename of Firebird for some legal reason if I remember correctly). One thing though, about AdBlock extention, even the developers have stated using large lists in AdBlock will slow down browsing. Someone over @ the Adblock Dev Board was wondering why people havent banded together to make like "teh ultimat uuber adblock list" and they said it would be to the users' disadvantage.

But yea, if you are having slow downs using the HOSTS file, check into eDexter from pyrenean.com Its a local webserver, and so it makes webpages load faster because it just puts an image from localhost onto the browser page.