Eliminating Flash ads

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Flash and popunder ads begone! Normally I prefer to just use a hosts file with common ad servers redirected to 127.0.0.1 to eliminate annoying online ads, but that often doesn’t eliminate annoying Flash ads. Putting sites that use Flash in the Restricted Sites zone can help, but only in IE, and when you do that, other things cease working (such as Acrobat). The Restricted Sites setting also kills a lot of popup and popunder ads, but at the same cost.
So what to do? The Web’s not going to get any less annoying, so I turned once again to a big gun that I used to use all the time: Proxomitron.

Occasionally I have to bypass Proxomitron for a site to work right, but I’d say 90-95% of the sites I visit work just fine with it enabled, and it clears out the junk nicely. And the memory usage isn’t really any higher than that of the various popup killer programs.

So if Flash ads are getting you down, and popunders are really starting to get you riled up (I hate finding I suddenly have 17 browser windows active that I didn’t open, and as leaky as IE is, such behavior is downright rude), give Proxomitron a long, hard look. You’ll be a whole lot happier.

Open mouth, insert foot. At work, we’re an NT shop, and we format our drives NTFS for security purposes. A few systems formatted FAT16 slipped out, but we had a project about a year ago to go back and convert all those systems to NTFS. Well, today, we were doing an Office 2000 upgrade on a system and it lacked sufficient free space. So I went up to have a look. I found 50 megs here, 50 megs there that I could clear out, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the drive up over 300 megs free. So, out of desperation, I went to look for some data I could compress, and I found compression wasn’t enabled. Huh? So I checked the drive. It was formatted FAT16.

So I ran back to my office to ask one of my coworkers if he still had the batch files we used way back when to convert FAT to NTFS. I walked into his cube.

“Sharon’s still FAT,” I said.

He gave me a funny look. “Well, I know she just got off maternity leave,” he said.

I turned red. “No, no, Sharon looks fine,” I said. (Yes, she just got off maternity leave but you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking.)

“Oh, you mean her computer’s not NTFS,” he said as everyone else in the office got a good laugh.

“Yeah,” I said.

The moral of the story ought to be really obvious. I got the batch files, scurried back up to her cube, converted her drive to NTFS–freeing up about 600 megs due to NTFS’ much smaller cluster size–and got out of there. I didn’t tell her the story.

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One thought on “Eliminating Flash ads

  • August 17, 2001 at 5:15 pm
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    Tut, tut, tut, Dave, you’re going to have to be more careful about how you say things with that Foot In Mouth Disease.

    Just kidding!

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