JohnD66 said:
I recently changed AV programs from Kaspersky to Norton/Symantec. The
Norton/Symantec AV doesn't have banner ad blocking, and I'm hoping
that Win XP might have some settings somewhere that minimize these
annoying banner ad programs (they do for pop-ups).
So how many times are you going to post your same question? This is the
third time (in this newsgroup) so it wasn't just the mistake of twice
hitting Send.
We are to guess at which web browser you are using? Different web
browsers have different solutions. FF has its adblock extension. There
are extensions for Google Chrome (a Chromium derivative) for ad
blocking. SRware Iron (another derivative of Chromium but without
Google's stupidities) already includes URL blocking but comes with an
empty adblock.ini file that you have to populate (yourself or from lists
compiled by others). For site or domain blocking in IE8, you can use
its InPrivate Filter but will need to compile or obtain the .xml import
file and do a registry edit to make IE8 always come up in its InPrivate
Filter mode (so you don't have to always remember to enable it). I
cannot speak to the plug-in for Firefox. For the plug-ins to Chrome and
the adblock.ini file for Iron, you're stuck with the filtering even if
you visit a site where that blocking is interfering with the site's
rendering and you want to turn it off. With Chrome, I suppose you could
disable the plug-in but you may have to open a new tab/window for it to
apply if a refresh doesn't work. For Iron, you would have to rename the
adblock.ini so Iron can't find it to apply the filtering of URLs
specified within (you could have a .bat file that simply toggled the
filename to switch off/on the filtering). For IE, the InPrivate
Filtering in IE8, you just click on its status bar icon to toggle it on
or off (harder to setup but easier to toggle).
If you don't want a web browser specific ad block plug-in then see if
using a hosts file works for you. You can block access to the specified
hosts. This lets you block only on hosts, not to domains. This means,
for example, you'll need around 70 hostnames listed just for the
Doubleclick domain. There are pre-compiled 'hosts' files, like the MVPs
hosts file, along with a HostMan utility that will update those files
rather than you having to remember to occasionally check if a newer
version of the file is available.
The above do not remove banner frames from web pages. Their intent is
to eliminate the content of banners or any ad-sourced content in a web
page. Ad blockers that look for images typical of banners will also
block content that is not a banner. They're just looking for sizes of
images commonly found for banners and blocking that content (actually
they may not block the content by eliminating the retrieval of that
content but instead just mask it out which means you still wasted the
bandwidth to retrieve and then mask out).
