Off With Their Heads... Ads!
I had never been quite aware of how much a nuisance ads on the net could be. Of course, pop-up windows used to piss me off and then Mozilla came around and fixed that.
It wasn’t until today as I was chatting away with pierre that I realised how much I had grown accustomed to ad banners: they were part of the landscape, just still there and nothing to think of. Yet they were sometimes quite a pain in the ass, especially when they are big Flash animations or pictures right in the middle of the text. I know this sounds like I’m coming from another planet, discovering that only now. But if you look around you, people don’t bother: they simply accept the fact that ads are part of the Net.
Once again, CSS along with Mozilla appears to be the panacea in that matter. I found a user style sheet on the Web, placed it under:
C:Documents and profiles<myname>Application Data¶ MozillaProfilesdefault<whatever>.sltchrome
and when I restarted my browser, I experienced a totally new way of surfing: an ad-free one. And it’s only at that moment that one realises how irritating ads can be. As I’m a bit of an extremist, I even added the following:
embed[classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"]
to the long list in order to hide Flash bits as well.
When you have a look at the user style sheet, it is only possible because Mozilla respects so much CSS standards. Thus, a selector such as *[href*="arandomdomain.net"] only works in browsers which try to get close to the W3C recommandation.
