It’s quite powerful, and you can nuke all kinds of annoying layout problems with it, especially if the site has lots of helpful CSS ids or class names. (If it doesn’t have good CSS, it’s a bit trickier but still doable for advanced users, although more likely to break or hide the wrong things if the site design changes.)

I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t people stop putting so much advertising on their sites. It looks like cluttered junk.
Advertising should be tastefully done, and done with restraint. The site still needs to look good! But some sites have ads placed all over, with pop ups and adds that follow your mouse.
If I ever use that kind of advertising I hope someone shoots me in the head just to put me out of my misery.
Just my 2 cents!

without ads, they won’t have any revenue from the website

I’m sure that would be easy for a grease monkey monkier.

Other pages will block until the ads respond… this is evil and should be punished. Emailing webmaster@where-ever used to be a good way to complain about such evilness. Blocking ads on those sites or even just not going to such sites is a-ok in my book.

If you’re a developer (or perhaps a blogger), it would be a good thing to make sure the site people are aware of this issue. They tend to work on a very very fast connection, so they might not notice such potential problems.

A user script is a simply a javascript you write which runs atop whatever pages you tell it to (you give it a list of pages, wildcards work). There is a hell of a lot of power there to do whatever you want.

As for ads generally, there are really two camps of people making ads… The very very annoying “get your attention” people, a lot of which are (or at least were back in the day) advertising professionals with training/experience in other media. And the much nicer (IMO) *relevant* ad folks who operate under the premise that less is more if the product/service being advertised is actually something the viewer is likely to be interested in. The old type go for a large number of views, the latter go for a higher percentage of click-throughs (and maybe even buys).

Anyways, just blocking ads will monetarily screw a lot of websites. If you have a fast connection, you might consider just not displaying ads from annoying places (but still loading them). Try not to block ads that aren’t annoying… they serve a purpose and might even tell you about some useful product or service you didn’t know about. Reward (or at least don’t punish) the folks doing it right.

NoScript is an absolute necessity for anyone running Windows. There’s too much “drive-by” malware being served by ads these days.

My Windows system at work got infected by visiting a local news web site and getting served an ad. This was before I’d (re-)installed AdBlock+.

Yes, you really can get infected by these things. Our tech support wound up re-imaging my laptop. That was an afternoon wasted.

It can be a bit of a pain to start using NoScript, since you have to explicitly add sites to a “whitelist” by clicking a button in the bottom of the browser’s status bar. Any new sites you visit may not work correctly until you whitelist them, or temporarily allow them for the duration of your visit.

Interestingly, NoScript also blocks Flash (YouTube, Vimeo, ..) in the same way as FlashBlock. So if you run NoScript, you don’t need FlashBlock anymore.

http://adblockplus.org/blog/linux-media-award-for-adblock-plus

I thought you professor-types had grad students browse the internet and print out relevant web pages with the ads and other objectional content removed.

But what YOU need to do, dear reader, is look at the ads now and then, and click on one now and then, follow the link with your credit card in hand and buy whatever product they are selling. The, write a note to the seller thanking them for placing an ad on this blog, because otherwise you would never have learned about your product, because this is pretty much the only ad that you (and your family and friends and coworkers) read.

Maybe once a week or so.

John: I’m going to look at that now. So far, text-based approaches that i’ve used don’t work because they spit out several down-pages worth of stuff like the contents of the left sidebar before getting to the post, which is the opposite of what I “want.” But It sounds interesting I’ll certainly have a look.

But flashblock+adaware make the web palatable. I want information from the web, and these apps make it so that I get the information I want w/o the bullshit I deplore. Just run them.