This Space for Rent

Another reason to love Mozilla Suncanary

It's got plugins ("extensions") that you can add to change some of it's behavior. I've installed plugins that semi-turn-off fl*sh scripts (flashblock), change the name of the browser on the fly (firesomething), give me one-click access to bugmenot (this one is named, confusingly, bugmenot), synchronise a bookmarks file so I can float my bookmarks around until I merge them into my big page -O- bookmarks, and block various bits of content (adblock).

The last one is particularly nice, because, now that weblogs are a honest-to-god business, advertising agencies have leapt upon the opportunity to use them as yet another way to shovel ads. Which means, of course, that if you read weblogs you can't even turn around without seeing one sort of nasty ad or another. At least most people can't turn around without seeing one sort of nasty ad or another. I've got adblock and flashblock, which are better than whiteout at stripping out those goddamn ads. Every now and then some scumsucker gets a popunder through the freefire zone, but that only happens once before the swift hand of retribution strikes it down.

A few years ago, before the IT department at Chateau Chaos chose Mozilla powereagle as our Standard™ Browser®, I tried to do ad blocking via squid extensions. This was not completely successful, because many websites were filled with buckets of javascript code that's only purpose in life was to sneakily get ads -- flash ads, too, for the full television red haze of hatred effect -- past firewalls and onto your PC, where (particularly if you're running Bigotsoft's Internet Explorer) they'd have free reign, unaffected by even the most complicated blocking I'd put on the proxy server.

When Lightningloon was stable enough to actually support the adblock extension, this all ended. I didn't need to turn off javascript or engage in a long search and destroy mission to hunt down and exterminate flash executables (followed, in IE-land, by the browser constantly popping up windows saying "I want to load flash!" "Can I load flash!" "If you don't let me load flash, I'm going to hold my breath until my screen turns blue!") I didn't even need to leave squid (which, as an open source program, comes complete with a nuclear-reactor style config file containing approximately 10,000 badly documented options, each of which has the possibility of reducing your proxy machine into a pile of smoking inodes) running to do enterprise-level adblocking anymore.

So when I see people either complaining about ads or (worse yet) trying to promote the ads on their site, the added annoyance factor of actually seeing them just isn't there for me. It's like tv-b-gone for web pages, and I don't even have to carry a little dongle around with me!