I use FireFox as my browser, in part to avoid what I believe are greater security risks using Internet Explorer. I use FireFox on Windows and Mac.

The number of video ads have been growing on the sites I visit to read up on news, especially on My Yahoo and in blogs. I did a search for advertising blockers on the FireFox web page and found AdBlock Plus.

It installed very easily, and asked me to pick an ad blocking filter service. I chose the first one called EasyList (USA). I went to My Yahoo and was very happy to see no banner ad at the top. Not only was it not showing, but all the news items shifted up so the banner space was put to better use.

I went to one of my favorite blogs and found good news there, too. No moving iTunes ad that I was used to seeing. Although I actually felt a little bad about that, since I’d much rather support Scot than Yahoo.

Later as I worked on updating our church website, I found a surprise. The random photo in the header did not show. I quickly figured out it was because I was using the banner ad feature in Joomla, which is the system I use to update the site. Instead of showing banner ads, I show snapshots from the church photo gallery. If someone clicks on the photo, it jumps to the photo album. Much more fun than real banner ads, but AdBlock Plus doesn’t know that. It just sees the word “banner” in the image source path so it blocks it.

Quickly figured out that a click on the “ADP” button let me choose… “Disable blocks from www.sjnlilburn.com.” The ADB button turned from red to green, and the photos are back.

I recommend FireFox and AdBlock Plus!