Advertising has become a large industry and we see it several times in our daily life. It is almost everywhere like in Books, Newspapers, TV, Billboards, and Movies. The advertisers convince the audience to buy their product or service. They actually describe the quality and benefits of the product solely or compared to with their competitive products. With the rise of Internet and World Wide Web, a new medium for advertising emerged, Online Advertising. The publishers monetize their content with a plenty of ad formats available. The advertisers have total control to show relevant ads on more relevant web pages. Online Advertising has a bright future as Advertisers are preferring Internet medium over offline medium (TV and Newspapers) for their marketing campaigns.
Online Advertising also has some downsides with respect to some Internet users. Some websites are filled with a lot of ads or even some irritating ads like pop up, floating or interstitial. Even ads may contain some adult material or malware. In some cases, the ads make a web page bulky or they are misleading like some error on your PC. To avoid the all or some advertisements, there have been some extensions developed for major web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. As Chrome is rather fresh, there have been some efforts to provide the functionality of popular Ad Block Plus. We will review here ad/script/flash blocking extensions developed for Google Chrome Browser.
Adthwart extension is currently the best extension which blocks the number of annoying and invasive ads in an elegant manner. It has borrowed some techniques from Ad Block Plus and uses Easy List to filter ads. Contrary to other ad blocking extensions, it provides an easy way to create your own filters by clicking its icon and following the instruction. Due to some limitation in Chrome Extension and DOM API, it can’t stop ads from loading rather it removes them after they have loaded. So, the user may see a splash of ads before disappearing. The developer has put built an experimental feature which can stop the momentarily appearance of Ads and can be enabled from Adthwart’s options. It works quite effectively but sometimes can’t stop the splash.
AdBlock is a nice competitor to Adthwart which also supports almost same feature. The feature to create own filters easily as in Adthwart is missing. In options, there is a choice to subscribe some popular ad filtering lists. It also has same experimental feature which tries to stop ads appearing momentarily. In options, an ad can black listed on a specific website by adding a CSS selector or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-K on a page and clicking the AdBlock icon over the ad.
In a test on labnol, I was amazed that they almost worked same. The only reason for which Adthwart has an upper hand is because of it “Easy Create Filter” feature. Both were not able to block Modified Adsense Ads and also Blogads network. The Ctrl-Shift-K feature of Adblock was not able to detect both Blogads and Adsense section but Adthwart did perfectly and filter was created easily .
Update:
As stated earlier, the above mentioned Chrome extensions for ad blocking were pretty much lagging and they actually hid advertisement rather blocking them. They were even not 100% successful in hiding them. Now we see some promising and efficient Chrome extensions for ad blocking as more and more developers are getting involved in building polished Chrome extensions.
AdSweep is an effort by Ariën Holthuizen, 15 year student from Netherlands. It outperformed all other ad blocking extensions and it almost did like Ad Block in Firefox. The pages loaded with much speed and the empty ad spots were joined back with content area. This had been possible due to some updates in Chrome extension API. It is an early release and destructs structure of some websites but the developer is committed to remove bugs and has released a beta release at his website which fixes most issues.
Blocker is another fresh extension for Chrome which commits to block ads in an efficient manner. It was actually developed as an image blocker but it turned into a full element blocker. It is also used to block undesired HTML elements through intelligent static and regex-like CSS filters. It uses fanboy’s AdBlock list to filter ads. The required websites can be white listed as well. The developer intends to provide a Javascript blocking functionality.
Download AdSweep and Blocker from official Chrome extensions gallery.
Verdict: Adthwart is currently the best extension to block ads on a web page but Adblock can become a better alternative in future. Still, both extensions need much improvement to match the efficiency of Ad Block Plus.
