If you love ads on your web pages, and your computer browses your favorite sites at blazing speed, you probably won’t care about this post.
As I’ve been configuring my new Linuxes, I’ve come across two tricks that have improved my browsing experience quite a lot.
First, there’s Privoxy, a free privacy-oriented proxy server. It examines the requests your browser sends out, and discards those headed for known ad servers. As a result, most of the ads on the front page of the New York Times, for example, are replaced by gray-and-white checkerboard patterns. You can probably configure the replacement image, but I haven’t looked for that yet.
Privoxy works on my Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktop, my XP laptop, and my mother’s XP desktop (she installed it in five minutes on the phone with me). I believe it also works on OS X but I don’t know that for sure.
Installation was trivial: download, unpack/install, set to run at startup, and start one now. Then tell the browser there’s a new proxy, and refresh the screen a couple of times. Presto! Ads gone. Didn’t have to reboot, even on XP!
Second, there’s OpenDNS. This is a free service that acts as a Domain Name Server of first resort. DNSs take a URL, more or less readable to humans, and convert it to an IP address (127.0.0.1), then dispatch the appropriate request to that address.
OpenDNS takes what you type into your address bar and interprets it with intelligence. It can correct spelling errors (craigslist.og when you mean .org), understand nicknames for sites and for actions, filter phishing sites, provide adult-content controls, and so on. But the most useful thing to me is that it speeds up browsing because they have enormous caches of recently requested web pages. If you request something that hasn’t expired, they ship you the cached one immediately, without having to contact the original site. This doesn’t matter in some cases, where your personal computer has cached the stuff; but in many cases you’ll notice significant improvements.
OpenDNS is even easier to use: there’s no software to download or install. All you have to is tell your system where the OpenDNS servers are, and you’re up and running. To use some of the features, you have to register, but it’s free and all you need is a working email address.
Obviously I have no monetary interest in these products, since they’re free. I don’t know anyone working for the companies, as far as I can tell. But I’ve had good experiences with them so far.
Adblock plus seems to do the same thing in Firefox (knock out the ads). It updates automatically to sense the new ads. And you can subscribe to several aggregators who scour the news ads to keep them from showing up. It updates automatically. For those still intent on staying with Windows for now, the add ons for Firefox are definitely a plus. And free.
There are some DNS add ons that probably do what you mention as well, but I've not expended the energy to try any of them.
I agree with you that Windows is a pig, a resource hog, but for now, I'm sticking with it, simply because I'm too lazy to be a guinea pig for Linux. I once worked at a start-up ISP in 1996 that eventually went broke, and Linux was a topic of conversation even then. It's nice to see Linux finally getting traction more than ten years too late. And of course, there's Red Hat Linux for the server market that's stealing business from Microsoft and Sun and others. But they serve a different market altogether.
Posted by: Buck on July 10, 2007 10:09 AM