When browsing internet web sites, often a user has to wait for all of the advertisements on a particular web page to load before any of the valuable web page content is displayed. This can be frustrating and very time consuming, but there is an answer for users of the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Application Suite web browsers.

Adblock is a filtering extension for these web browsers that allows a user to prevent advertisements and other page elements from being displayed when browsing the internet. Similar to the built in image blocker in Mozilla’s applications, Adblock will successfully block HTTP requests depending on their source address and can block IFrames, script and Flash for being downloaded or displayed. In 2004 a more advanced version of the Adblock extension for Mozilla web browsers was introduced. This version is called Adblock Plus and offers improvements to the user interface, filter subscriptions and element hiding.

The main focus of the Adbock Plus version of Adblock is its usability. The Plus version has a main window with menu items at the top, and a sidebar that integrates a list of the blockable items on a page which can be removed for the main web browser window. The element hiding of Adblock can be used to compliment regular ad blocking. It uses automatically generated user stylesheets to hide elements on a web page as they load rather than just blocking them. Some of the other newer features of Adblock Plus include the ability to enable or disable filters, and a set of filter statistics to determine the effectiveness of the filters that are being used. Adblock, however, has removed the site-blocking feature that was used in the original version of Adblock.

The first version of Adblock Plus was created by Michael McDonald, which improved on the orgional Adblock by adding whitelisting, blocking of background images, subscriptions to filters, ability to hide HTML elements, ability to hide adverstisements on a per site basis and memory leak fixes. However, Michael McDonald discontinued development of Adblock Plus after this version was released and transferred the development rights over to Wladimir Palant, who released the next version of Adblock Plus in January of 2006.

The subscriptions that are available to users of Adblock Plus can be found on their website. A user can subscribe to more that one list and these lists are automatically updated. This is the easiest way for a user to keep up with the every changing ways that web site developers display advertisements to get around advertisement blockers such as Adblock. If the subscriptions that you are using do not seem to be blocking some of the advertisements that you dislike, you can always individually enter filter parameters to tell Adblock Plus to block them in the future.

For more help in setting up Adblock Plus, be sure to visit the Adblock Plus web site. There you will find tutorials on installing the extension, signing up for different subscriptions and troubleshooting help to get you on your way.