Many people live on Adblock. Even though many may think that Firefox is the only browser with Adblock, Opera can extend pretty far in terms of blocking certain content. (This will only work on Windows)

Update: As of Opera 9, this custom application is no longer necessary. This technique will do just fine.

The following is a normal page view of digg.com, without Adblock.

The following is a page view of digg in Firefox with Adblock enabled.

The following is a page view of digg in Opera with its unique ad-blocking abilities.

If you haven’t noticed, the ads and the ad container in Opera are gone, leaving more space for sensational viewing. If you don’t enjoy viewing ads or having huge ad containers wasting space on your monitor, then the following trick for Opera will do you good.

The Things You’ll Need

Opera does not support extensions. However, it has a variety of extensive built-in options that, with some tweaking, will do anything you want. To block all ad related content and containers with Opera, you’ll need the following assets.

• Opera — the latest release as of now is 9.00 Preview 2, which will work the best.
• Opera Ad Blocker — a custom program to block ads (modifed from this).

Now Block Those Ads

This is an expanded version (with screenshots) of the readme.txt in the original zip for Opera Ad Blocker.

1. In the Opera Ad Blocker zip, unzip OperaAdBlock.exe into a directory that you will not delete. It’s best to keep it in your Opera program directory for organization (e.g. C:\Program Files\Opera\).

2. Extract filter.ini and menu.ini to your Opera profile directory. This could be C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\. If that directory doesn’t exist, it’s C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\.

   The filter.ini is the list of links to be blocked. It is by default a list obtained from Filterset.G as of today. If it doesn’t block something, you can add more to the end of the file (as we’ll see later).

   The menu.ini is to add a menu item when you right click on an image/object.

   

   You’ll have to modify the paths to OperaAdBlock.exe and filter.ini in that file. There are 2 instances of “; -- EDIT BELOW --” — find each, and below that you will see

   Item, "Add to Block List" = Copy image address & Execute program,
   "C:/Program Files/OperaTools/OperaAdBlock.exe",
   "C:/Documents and Settings/USERNAME/Application Data/Opera/Opera8/profile/filter.ini"

   Change the bold file directories so they point to the place you unzipped OperaAdBlock.exe and filter.ini.

   If you already have a menu.ini in your profile folder (you are already modifying the menu), copy the last line of each section from this file and paste it under your original.

Blocking Ad Containers

Blocking ad containers involves editting a CSS sheet and setting the HTML id’s of those container elements to display: none;. If you have a few sites with ads you visit everyday, you’ll find this very useful.

1. Go to opera:config in Opera. Click Author Display Mode, check User CSS if it isn’t already checked.

2. Then click User Prefs (near the bottom), and for Local CSS File enter the address of a CSS file that you will edit and not delete. For Example:

   C:/Documents and Settings/USERNAME/My Documents/user.css

3. Last step: create a CSS file in that directory with that name (in my example, user.css) and enter the id’s that you want to hide. This actually involves looking at the HTML source code of the page you are viewing, find the ad container, and the id. Most of the times (and on most well designed sites), the containers have id’s. For the ones that don’t, you can forget about it.

   Example: digg.com

   On digg’s home page, there is a Google Adsense ad on the top. After looking at the source code:

   <div id="google-broad"><div><script type="text/javascript"><!--
   google_ad_client = "pub-7489042062340760";
   google_ad_width = 728;
   google_ad_height = 90;
   google_ad_format = "728×90_as";
   google_ad_type = "text";
   google_ad_channel ="4567327683";
   google_color_border = "F7F8FB";
   google_color_bg = "F7F8FB";
   google_color_link = "0033CC";
   google_color_url = "0066CC";
   google_color_text = "666666";
   //--></script>
   <script type="text/javascript"
     src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
   </script></div></div>

   The id is “google-broad”. So open up that CSS file that you created and enter

   #google-broad { display: none ! important }

   Do this for every ad container you think sucks and you will never see them again! Of course after each edit of the CSS file, restart of Opera is required (close it and open it again).

I realize that this works on Firefox as well, but being the Opera promoter I am, try Opera. It’s fast. And with this adblock technique, you can use Opera like you didn’t know what ads are.