Being the Opera enthusiast I am, I urge you to try out Opera if you are not already using it. That being said, there must be some advantages it has over Firefox or IE. There’s speed, customizibility, and now ad blocking.
Opera 9 included a built-in “content blocker”. I’m guessing they aren’t calling it “ad blocker” so those ad companies won’t stop funding Opera. But this content blocker works exactly like an ad blocker. Simply right click on the page, click Block Content, and select the images or Flash movies you want to block. It usually selects the right url so it blocks all the ads from the ad provider, but you can customize it as you like.
If you want to, you can manually set the block list by going to your Opera profile folder (which is usually C:\Documents and Settings\<USER>\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile), and the file urlfilter.ini will contain all of those. Include urls after the [exclude] line, and they will be blocked the next time you start Opera.
Opera 9 doesn’t support regular expression for the blocking list though. So Filterset.G will not work. However, it does support wild characters — *. You can insert or append the character * anywhere in the url, and it will match any links to your url.
Opera does have some really nice features, and I used it exclusively for around 2 months while firefox was kinda messed up. After I reformatted my comp and tried firefox again there was no way I was going back.
It’s all the little things that I like with Firefox, ie) entering in URLs, firefox puts the most visited links at the top. This is really convenient and much quicker then going through your bookmarks for recently visited sites.
This technique works fine for some ads, but not “inline” or CSS-based ads that Adblock and its ilk seem to be quite good at removing.
Adblock doesn’t actually remove any CSS based ad containers. It just blocks more iframes and more of that ad space is eliminated.
Since you define your own blocked list, Opera doesn’t block as many ads as Adblock, so some of its ad spaces are still showing as blanks. But that’s worth it for Opera’s speed and features :)
The problem with opera’s inferior blocking feature is that anyone who conceals images, which many ads are, can easily deflect them being blocked by covering them with a blank gif. The only way to block content from the same site you are visiting is sifting manually through the source or using another real browser to find out what the image name is and then block it. Images that lie beneath other blanks are totally non-existent to right-clicks and the blocked content feature in Opera. If I dont find a solution to this Opera will be uninstalled like it always is.
You are right about that. If only Opera would implement Firefox’s extension engine and be able to run those extensions…
Opera > Firefox. ‘Nuff said. Was an AVID FF fan for months on end. I tried Opera, and while I wasn’t so hot on it at first, I grew to absolutely love it. It ran a lot faster than FF, had some nice features for web designing, and it much easier on my memory. I still love Firefox, but even when I tried to get the extensions to emulate Opera as much as possible, the slower it got. Opera 9 was the icing on the cake with the newest features it has.
Yeah. I just switched tofay. I was getting extremely pissed about Firefox’s memory leaks.
Install the cross-platform local proxy from http://privoxy.org/ and set your browser(s) to use it.
I still slightly prefer the ease of the Adblock extension but Privoxy can additionally be set up to proxy tor and other useful goodies.
And… IMHO, Firefox has caught up in a lot of ways but I still prefer Opera.
Wow that is an amazing program. I have installed Privoxy and set my Opera proxy settings. A lot of the ads are indeed blocked.
I’ll give this a try. Thanks Troy!
Hi,
I know it’s kinda late to post here, but you should try using a CSS filter from www.floppymoose.com. It’s only 4kb and you can include more stuff if needed. Using that CSS with Block Content (build in Opera), you can block all ads. I am now trying to include the easyElement (from adblock plus subscription) to block iFrames. Oh, and I forgot to say a CSS can be used with your favorite browser, Opera, Firefox, Safari…
I wouldn’t say that ad blocking is an “advantage” of Opera over Firefox, it’s just that now that Opera has implemented this feature, it’s ome more thing that’s up to par with Firefox.
I use Firefox regularly, and just reinstalled Opera to try it out again. To say the least, Firefox does run slower than Opera, but I do have a few install-and-forget extensions that I use regularly.
Trying to compare Opera to Firefox is like trying to compare apples to oranges, or comparing 1 to “i” (an imaginary number). They just don’t get along.
(And anyway, Adblock Plus can block iFrames as well. Once I start seeing that feature in Opera I’ll start usign it more often as well.)
This is “content blocking”? *I* have to dig through the page source and manually update a file? You gotta be shitting me! What is this? MS-DOS 3.3?
While we’re at it, let’s go back to punched cards. I’m so glad Nokia is ditching Opera for Mini-Mo in their next OS for the N800 & N810.
But in the meantime I’m stuck with this steaming pile of a browser. At least it’s better than the unnamed abortion that my Palm TX used, but that’s not saying much.
[…] has a manual way of blocking images, and some filters to block the ads can be obtained from: Opera 9 Ad Blocking page and Opera ad block filters […]