Firefox Adblock is a god send. I no longer need to suffer through annoying ads that won’t stop animating. I now block them. That’s right, I block them. I don’t complain to the advertiser, I don’t complain to the publisher, and I don’t bother with the third party ad servers (e.g. Doubleclick). I block the ad right then and there.

Advertising and Internet publishing industries take heed. I’m not the only one installing Adblock and using it. I understand that advertising pays the bills, but user control is what the Internet is about. You respect us and we’ll respect you. If not, your ad will be blocked. We have the control to let ads live or kill them on the spot.

Unfortunately for all the sites that carry Doubleclick and Atlas ad banners I banned those companies from their root domains. I was sick of seeing ads I had already banned. I’ll lift the ban next quarter when I think the ads have completed their run and give them another chance. Nextag also got the boot, but only because I find them slimey for reasons I won’t go into.

update: Unfortunately, Adblock isn’t stable any longer. There is some sort of bug with Flash combined with javascript that causes it to crash my browser when visiting certain sites. I reported it as much as I could but am no longer able to stand the crashes.

Update (4/13/07): Firefox AdBlock Plus appears to be stable. I’ve had it installed for a few weeks now and haven’t crashed once. Knock on wood. Get it today and take back some control. I don’t recommend following the default AdBlock schemes because cutting out all ads will undermine the companies providing the free products you use. Rather, block only those ads that are truly intrusive, annoying, and disrespectful such as ads that play sound automatically or don’t stop animating. Currently, I only block: (1) everything from fastclick.net for spawning pop-unders; and (2) two ads from Atlas DMT (ATDMT.com) because they wouldn’t stop animating when I read a news article.