Tired of ads appearing on web pages?

It's the Holiday Season again. Advertising is all around us! Even talk radio seems to run endless ads during commercial time, and it's only going to get worse. Why do we need to put up with this on our Internet too?

WE DON'T!

There are a large handful of tools available to block ads from appearing within web pages, and some are free. The one I use is IE7Pro, which is for the Internet Explorer that comes with windows.

This is a free download, and it very effectively blocks website ads that flash at you begging to be clicked upon. From their own website: "Blocks all forms of advertising, including Flash ads, rich media, fly-ins, slide-ins, pop-ups, pop-unders, spyware and adware ads, and messenger ads."

Heck, they had me at "blocks all forms of advertising!!"

But this add-on for the Internet Explorer Browser goes much further than that, and I feel comfortable recommending it to my clients. It offers an inline search, which is a feature that I enjoy using. The program improves tabbed browsing for the new version of Explorer, and if you use the older version like myself, you still get to enjoy about twenty other features.

If you use Firefox as your browser, there is an add-on available for you that comes right from the Firefox Developers. It is called "AdBlock Plus" and it's just as easy to use. When you see an ad banner or something you don't want to ever see again, you can just click on it with the right mouse button. A menu will appear that allows you to choose to 'AdBlock' the image. It's as simple as that!

I hope these tips help. This time of year it's very hard to avoid being bombarded with ads for everything from apples to xylophones. Don't let these ads spoil your Internet Experience also.

-Paul Brustas