Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Well, I like being anonymous to the ad networks, they do consider me important  every bit helps. 
So... I installed a few key Firefox plugins and forgot about them. Speeds up my internet too, now that I'm not loading a bajillion ad scripts (I wonder how much the plugin slows me down in turn?  ) |
I'm not fanatical about blocking ads, and don't especially care about being tracked. The tracking is done by advertisers who want to better understand my interests and have a better idea of what they might be able to sell me.
Fine by me. Like everyone else, I buy goods and services, and advertising is one way I discover stuff I might wish to buy. The better targeted the pitch is, the less time I spend separating wheat from chaff.
I installed ad blocking in the first place simply to cut down clutter and make various sites I visited more readable. What I did previously was use a Firefox extension called Stylish. Stylish lets you run arbitrary CSS (called UserStyles) based on the site you are viewing. I used Stylish to run a CSS style called Filterset P. Filterset P is under the hood in things like AdBlock Plus. It defines a long list of ad servers and simply doesn't display content fetched from them. AdBlock Plus uses JavaScript to look for things to block as well, but I didn't want the additional overhead.
Currently, I run a product called uBlock that does things similar to AdBlock but claims less overhead.
I also have the NoScript extension installed, which blocks scripting unless the site is in a user maintained whitelist.
Browsing here is quick, thank you. Part of that is a 100 mbit/sec broadband connection. The other is that in Windows, I put the Firefox profile and cache on a ramdisk. My desktop has a quad-core 2.4ghz Xeon CPU and 8GB RAM, dual booting Win7 Pro and Ubuntu 14.04. With 8GB RAM I can afford to carve out a slice for a ramdisk (especially since I've never seen physical memory usage above 40%.) I found an open source 64bit Windows ramdisk driver, so there's a 512MB ramdisk seen as Z:. The Firefox profile is stored in a zip file, and unzipped to the ramdisk by a boot script when Windows loads. A shutdown script zips it back to catch changes when Windows is shutdown/rebooted. An entry in the FF profile.ini file points to the profile on the ramdisk, and is run by "firefox -p ramdisk". An entry in the Firefox preferences tells it to put the cache on the ramdisk, That's separate from the profile, and I don't try to preserve it across boots.
Speeds things up a treat.
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Dennis