Tom Raftery's Musings

One of the reasons I like Firefox so much is its extensibility – something annoying you about your browsing experience? Well, if your browser is Firefox, the chances are that someone else has been frustrated by the same issue and written an extension to overcome that it.

My current favourite extension is called Adblock. Adblock is sweet. It does what it says on the tin. It blocks ads.

Now, I don’t have anything against ads, per se – I have ads on this site myself. What annoys me is when an ad on a site takes so long to download that it slows down the page load significantly. This is often because the ad is hosted on a busy, under-specced adserver somewhere.

What Adblock allows you to do is to block an individual ad – or all ads from a particular adserver. This is brilliant. Suddenly, pages that took ages to load, come up almost instantly.

Adserver administrators beware – invest in your infrastructure or you will be by-passed.