As someone who sometimes gets money for internet ads, I don’t mind ads on websites, but I hate pop-ups and pop-unders. So I keep those blocked. And I also don’t like the ads that expand over the content of the web page. Usually these ads only expand if your mouse is over them and once you move the mouse out of the way, the ad shrinks back down. So I never did anything about that. But today I was looking up information about HDTV receivers that could also record (my HDTV receiver doesn’t work anymore and my TV can’t unscramble HD by itself). I was on a discussion area and there was an ad that would expand all by itself every now and then. You could click close, but you had to keep clicking on it. I thought I would block traffic from doubleclick.com who were producing the ad, which I remembered being pretty easy, but I couldn’t do it in either Firefox or McAfee after looking around a little. I did a search and found software called AdBlock, but then found something called Flashblock which only blocks content made for Adobe Flash player. The good thing is it replaces the ad with a Play icon so if you run across Flash content that you actually want, you can hit play and see it. I found it on Mozilla’s website, so I figure it must be okay.
I’ve used AdBlock Plus (ADP) for years. It puts a little button in Firefox that I can toggle on and off. (Being in marketing, I sometimes want to see ads.) Like you, I installed it way back when Yahoo started having ads float across the content I was reading.
You can script AdBlock Plus. I got annoyed with Facebook trying to push offensive ads, and after closing them with an “offensive” tag about 100 times, I set ABP to kill all Facebook ads.