Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is a fast, powerful, and highly customizable browser plugin that can block ads, popups, and other Web items, It also supports a wide range of web browsers, including Google Chrome.

Some Web surfers simply don’t want to see any ads at all, but most people who run a browser add-on like Adblock Plus are doing it because intrusive Internet marketing is exposing them to malware and other threats and causing their browsers to perform slowly or become unstable. Whether you just hate ads or want to protect your user experience, Adblock Plus is one of the best options around.

Adblock Plus works by using filters. Webpage requests for content are first checked against these filters, and if an offending domain is found, the request is denied. This approach is simple and effective. It also allows for whitelists, which means that you can turn on ads for websites who behave or you want to support. Supporting a site doesn’t require going under the hood. It just requires a button press, and you can permit and block sites or even individual pages on the fly.

Adblock Plus comes with a default filter. You can add additional filters and customize individual filters. If you have the technical understanding, you can create your own filters, but there are numerous high-profile Adblock Plus filters available for you to download and even subscribe to. Subscribing means that Adblock Plus will check for a filter update each session and update it accordingly. If you do create your own filters, you have granular control and can block individual elements and the like.

This program can be a bit overzealous blocking content, but it offers a mode where non-intrusive ads are allowed, and that fixes the over-aggressiveness for the most part. Adblock Plus is also quite good when it comes to deciding what is and what is not intrusive. This extension can be a bit of a resource hog. This has gotten better over time, depends greatly on the browser being used and will be felt the worst on computers getting a bit long in the tooth.

Pros

• User-friendly
• Highly customizable
• Supports filters and whitelists

Cons

• Over-aggressive by default
• Can be a resource hog