This article was written in 2002, but still holds a few valuable tips.
Back in 1998, surfing the Internet was less complicated. The user wasn’t constantly bombarded with pop-up advertisements. Spyware or adware barely existed. And Flash was an exciting technology, not an invasion of noise and clutter on your browser. Today most users are hammered by pop-up windows, junk email, and most are unaware they have some form of adware or spyware installed on their system right now. Something went wrong, something went very wrong.
This article is not about how invasive advertising is ruining the surfing experience. You already know that. This is about taking back power from the advertising avalanche. The following steps are how you can restore some civility to your browser.
Eliminate Spyware and AdWare
Spyware and adware are little programs that get installed on your computer that monitor your Internet habits and bombard you with ads. I first learned about adware when I was surfing on Amazon.com. As soon as I arrived at the site, I saw a pop-up ad for a competing bookstore. Why would Amazon do such a thing? I poured through the source code of their document and realized they didn’t. Something evil was lurking on my computer. After some investigation I discovered some freeware that I installed had placed an adware program on my machine. Getting rid of it wasn’t easy.
Simply uninstalling a piece of freeware with adware doesn’t always remove it. Fortunately, the good people at LavaSoft have written a piece of software called Ad-Aware. According to their site: Ad-aware is a free multi spyware removal utility that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware components and lets you remove them safely.
Download this software and run it. It is wonderful.
Protect Yourself From Future Spyware and Adware
Before you download or run any new software, run a background check on it first. The word freeware used to mean that the author was some cool programmer sharing his or her work for free. Today it often means that the program has embedded code to toss ads all over your screen. Spy Checker is an on-line database that tracks which applications are adware or spyware. Go to SpyChecker.com before installing any software.
Who Do You Trust?
On Internet Explorer there is a section under Security called Trusted Sites. Go check and see if anything in there doesn’t belong. If it doesn’t, remove it. Many of you will see an AOL server listed. Whenever you install an AOL product (Instant Messenger or Netscape) the evil AOL-Time Warner adds itself to your IE trusted sites list. Get rid of it!
From an Information Week article:
When a user downloads or updates AIM, free.aol.com is added to the users’ IE Trusted Sites Zone. This also happens if you download Netscape6.x with integrated AIM. It is one thing for them to put that free.aol.com link everywhere when you download N6, even in IE’s bookmarks, but quite another thing to mess with security settings. Although mostly harmless, it is the principle. I don’t think this is right. If this was Microsoft messing with a Netscape security setting, all hell would break loose.
Stop The Pop
There are countless pop-up window killers out there. Find one you like and use it. Surfing without a pop-up killer today is like driving without a seatbelt. For more products go to Download.com and search on pop-up.
Boycott the Bastards, Reward the Heroes
What sites do you surf frequently? Do the sites you visit practice aggressive advertising? When the Weather Channel started using Flash advertising, I stopped going there for my weather information. When Yahoo started using pop-up windows, I changed my home page to Google.com, which refuses to use pop-up ads.
Attacking the Senses
How many animated graphics (gifs) really enhance the surfing experience? Maybe 1%. The rest are annoying. And how about background sounds? If I choose to play an audio file that’s great, but I don’t want to give control of my speakers to some web site. Finally, have you ever exited a web page only see it delay and then do some weird color collapse? That’s called a page transition. Fortunately, with Internet Explorer we can eliminate all 3 of these.
From Tools, select Internet Options, and then click the Advanced tab. Uncheck Enable Page Transitions. Then scroll down to the Multimedia section. From here you can uncheck Play Animations in Web pages, Play Sounds in Web Pages and even Play Videos in Web Pages. Doing these small steps will calm many of the annoying pixels dancing in your browser.
Conclusion
One of the topics I didn’t cover due to it’s complexities is ad-blocking. For those interested, read Blocking Ads with a Hosts File. Ad-blocking works by intercepting requests to popular ad web servers. The result is fewer banners and faster downloads.
