Recently I was looking for something to block ads while I surf the net, something quick and clean, and preferably a plugin for Firefox.  What I found was an extension called AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant.  This has been a great little extension, as it blocks ads, (images, swfs, scripts) from appearing on the page at all by using url blocking with wildcards.

In the event that there is a small subset of legitimate content within a larger mostly-ad-riddled domain, you can whitelist the “good” segment as well.

I’ve been using this one for about 2 weeks now on both the Macbook and the windows box, and to be honest, not noticing a big lot of difference… but maybe that’s the point.  I can honestly say I don’t remember seeing a lot of ads in the past couple of weeks… I’ve tried turning off the ad-blocker on a few selected pages (i.e. yahoo.com) and immediately a whole bunch of ads showed up.  So I guess it must be doin’ somthing!

One mildly annoying thing that ABP did was cause flash videos (ie Embedded YouTube videos) to display incorrectly.  The solution is to deselect the option  Show tabs on Flash and Java.  Thanks to Vaughn Dickson over at Ninja Monkeys for posting the diagnosis and fix!