Take that advertisements!

Do you hate websites that have animated advertisements? They are highly distracting and are often irrelevant to the actual content of the website. One example of a website I have recently gone to is CliffsNotes (free English notes about literature books), which is jam-packed with both animated and non-animated image advertisements.

I have found a neat (and free) add-on to Mozilla Firefox that blocks off the majority of animated advertisements. If you don't use Firefox already, I highly recommend you give it a try. Although it used to be much better than Internet Explorer, Microsoft have improved IE a lot recently. But there are still some very small things that you will find more convenient when you compare Firefox to IE.

Anyway, the add-on to Firefox I was talking about is called Flashblock. As its name suggests, it blocks parts of websites that use flash. Where the flash object used to be, an 'F' symbol appears, which you can click on to run the Flash program if you feel like it.

Click here to download Flashblock.

This wonderful add-on, coupled with unchecking Tools --> Options --> Content --> Load Images Automatically, easily took care of all the image advertisements on CliffsNotes. Of course, you will want to turn the latter option on again when you visit other websites, otherwise images won't load.

You'll be surprised at the number of advertisements that Flashblock will block during normal browsing (e.g. YouTube, Hotmail, etc.).