How To Block Online Adverts

You don’t have to see adverts on Facebook, Youtube – or anywhere else on the internet for that matter.

There’s no denying that the whole internet is plastered with adverts, many of them are either annoying, intrusive or both. That’s the kind of advertising that you definitely don’t want to be subjected to. And it’s exactly the kind of adverts that Adblock Plus wants to get rid of.

Many of the ads online are banner adverts, some of them are out of the way but most of them are placed above the fold or within the flow of content. Because of that we’ve become so used to seeing them with the rest of the content that we often look past them as if they weren’t even there. It’s called banner blindness and it’s one of the reasons that adverts keep getting more and more intrusive.

It’s so easy to set up adblocking in your browser all you need to do is install and activate the awesome Adblock Plus plugin.

About Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus started out as a Firefox addon way back in 2002, back then it was simply Adblock. Adblock was completely abandoned in 2006 but luckily Adblock was forked in 2005 and turned into Adblock Plus. In 2006 is was converted to a standalone plugin and a 1 year on it was the most downloaded plugin on the Firefox – it’s remained in the top spot ever since.

To date there have been over 200 million downloads and counting.

How to Block Adverts on Chrome, Firefox or Opera in 3 steps.

 The official website displays the correct install button for your browser. When I took this screenshot I was on chrome.

1. Simply go to the official website, or visit your browsers addons store and search for it, to download the plugin.
2. On the official site you’ll see something like the picture above. Just click the button to install it and accept when prompted.
3. Once you’ve done that you shouldn’t see adverts anymore. It’s as simple as that.

Adblock for Android

Adblock for Android blocks ads in your browser but it also blocks adverts within apps too. That’s a major bandwidth saver for those of you who on a fixed data plan.

There’s been some commotion around Adblock on Android and it was recently removed from the Play Store. It blocks adverts, Google and other app creators monetize apps with adverts so therefore it violates rules by removing them. I don’t care about that, all I care about is getting rid of those adverts, making my apps run faster and saving on my bandwidth.

Because it was removed from Google Play you need to sideload the app to install it. I’ll cover sidelading apps on android later in the week for those of you who don’t know how to do it.

Visit AdblockPlus.org on your Android click, the button to download the app and install the .apk file you get. Then open up the app and enable filtering with the slider.7

After installing ABP

Once you've got APB up and running enjoy your advert free browsing. You notice websites flow better without them and that pages will normally load much faster, particularly if the site was displaying flash or video adverts.

There's a few more things that you can do with Adblock Plus after you get it running, for instance blocking the hundreds of Facebook adverts, recommended pages and sponsored stories plus a few more filters to make sure you only see the updates that you want. I'll take a look at that in more detail on Wednesday.