Annoying flash and banner ads…how to get rid of them.
// February 3rd, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Offtopic
After being pounded by online advertisements on practically every single website that I happened to visit I decided to invest some time into looking at how I could block these advertisements effectively and without having to sacrifice my mobility on the internet.
I tried different free options such as adblock but found these were not very flexible and often lead to many legitimate page elements being damaged or not displaying correctly. A lot of ad’s weren’t blocked at all (because new ad servers pop up all the time) and it was hard to find the correct entry to block them, especially flash ads.
Plus, adblock only seems to work for firefox, and I am a big fan of Opera and want to block ads for people who use Internet Explorer at home too.
Then I came across a nifty little program called AdMuncher. At first I really did not think that a paid-for adblocker could be any good so I downloaded a trial version to play around with. I was at first surprised at how small and light at was, and then I had a put it through it’s paces online. I was really surprised at how darn good it was at blocking ads.
Let me give you some examples:
A google search for “horse saddles” without Admuncher:
And here it is again with Admuncher enabled and filtering:
Good, isn’t it 
Just one more example to show you the effect it has and how much less intrusive your browsing can be, this time a random blog like this one:
…..and now again with AdMuncher:
Admuncher also has a bunch of other useful features and very responsive support (even though the development team is very small). Below is a screenshot of one of the settings screens. Admuncher works very well out of the box but if you like tweaking there are lots of goodies for you in here 
The other awesome thing is that you can report ads via right clicking on them inside your browser of choice and sending them directly to the Admuncher team..who will then update the filter list which admuncher automatically downloads a couple of times per day.
It has no noticeable impact on system performance and you can choose to hide the tray icon if you do not wish to see the little admuncher cow chomping away at all the ads (although it is pretty cute).
After trialling it for a few days I was left in no doubt that this was a no-brainer purchase and went ahead to order 2 licenses, one for my desktop and the other for my laptop. It has been a long time since I have seen an ad on the internet curtosey of this little guy. Shame can’t be said about in real life too
Anyway, let me stop rambling and trying to convince you how awesome it really is- go ahead and download the fully functional 30 day trial by clicking HERE and see for yourself how much faster and more pleasant browsing becomes minus all the annoying ads. There is no obligation to buy and admuncher can easily be installed via programs and features or add/remove programs section inside Windows.
