AdBlock Plus

 

  So I'm not a fan of "toolbars" though Google's Toolbar is actually handy with auto-translation tools and extra pop-up-blocking abilities as well as some standard Google features as "buttons" you can add, such as "Google News", "YouTube" (Google owns this), GMail, and a better-than-most Spell Checker, as well as a Google Search bar you can type-in things.  For these useful reasons, I approve Google's Toolbar.  It's safe, spam-free, and just plain good and customizable by right-clicking in it as-necessary.

https://adblockplus.org/en/internet-explorer

 

Makin' money the wrong way...

  There's a fairly recent product for us IE11 (Internet Explorer 11) users called AdBlock Plus.  It's free and I've installed it with great hesitation.  Once installed, all those YouTube ads that show up when someone "monetizes" their video is now gone.  No 30-second force-watched commercials.  This seems to work for just about all websites, some less savory than others, now ad-free! 

  It's a little freaky to go to some ad-riddled sites and see just white space where there was tons of ads.  Also, it seems indestructible LiveJasmin is especially thwarted, which is quite nice.  Those that view Yahoo as a browser (I don't) will be delighted to notice a rather comfortably sparse site.  Old sites devastated by ads built in places like GeoCities and Angelfire are now what they originally were, with no ads, not to mention news sites like the "Baltimore Sun" below, which becomes an almost blank page.   It's pretty amazing.

  Now what does AdBlock Plus get in return?  I suspect some data mining in the same vein search engines do, or FaceBook, though they admit they're currently not doing that.  Looks more like they're using extortion to allow some ads through on very rare occasions. 



"Just one.. teeny ad.. once in a GREAT while, okay?" -C.Rice

  ADB is customizable by right-clicking the tiny icon at the bottom of IE11 (it also works for every other browser and there are phone apps for those annoyed by freeware ads). You can click it once to "Disable on this website only" and it saves it as a safe-list.  This website I use for blogger uses a Java script to add the images so I needed to disable it for posts.

 

  So far so good.  If there's any problems I'll keep you posted, but after a lot of research and use, I find it no problem so far, and nothing evil has been installed on my PC yet as far as I can tell registry-wise.  Two thumbs up.