A lot of people don’t realise Adblock Plus in Firefox does NOT block ALL ads unless you customise the preferences.
The program works because it has a great big list of filters. As well as the code based filters, two of the filters are the Black List which is a list of web sites or sub-sites that are to be blocked and a White List of sites or sub-sites to be allowed.
This is because are lot of ad services are listed in the service White List. Here’s some examples from my service White List:
@@.com/ads/*.swf?clicktag=$object_subrequest,domain=rollingstone.com
@@/adfinder.jsp?*/oascentral.feedroom.com/realmedia/ads/*$subdocument,domain=businessweek.com|economist.com|feedroom.com|stanford.edu
@@||ads.adultswim.com/js.ng/site=toonswim&toonswim_pos=600x400_ctr&toonswim_rollup=games$script
@@||ad.doubleclick.net/adj/imdb2.consumer.video/*;sz=320×240,$script
As you can see these mostly relate to the ads on particular sites, not generic ad sites. But they do have the effect of allowing ads to be displayed on those sites.
These can be turned off by going to the Firefox Ad-ons area and selecting the Adblock add-on, then selecting the ‘Preferences’ button. Once that opens you go down the huge list until you find the White List – this list is usually a different colour to the blocking lists. Then you remove the ‘tick’ in the box beside it, thus deactivating this rule.
When I first found this out the list was headed up with a Group name of ‘White List’ but my latest version has it under the following group name:
!———————————Exception rules to fix problems———————————-!
For reasons unknown they’ve changed it from White List to this.
……….
You do have to check this from time to time as when the list is updated by Adblock more are added and a major update will sometimes turn them all back on again.
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Another thing is you can add your own rules to fine tune blocking on any particular site as well. My own personal rules have blocked half a million ads in the last eight weeks.
You need to learn how to set this as a base list rule to block a site will NOT block some of their daughter sites and example being the base rule to block the first site below won’t block the second site below as it sees it as being from a different domain and not applicable.
ad.doubleclick.net
ad.au.doubleclick.net
Hope this helps you make your browser better.
Ernest
