As a rule, most ad blockers come with the ability to block both banners and pop-up windows and offer a number of extra features on top.
As far as banners are concerned, ad blockers detect them before they start downloading and, therefore, block the loading process. Practically all of the applications considered in this review detect banners by the URL generating it - the so-called "black list". Some of the applications enable the user to modify ad generators black list with exporting and importing functions. The ability to select one or several banners on the page with the mouse and send them to the black list from a contextual menu comes in handy quite a lot.
Modern ads are often created with the help of flash technologies. Therefore an efficient ad blocker should no doubt be able to cut out flash banners as well.
But just a list of "bad" URL's is rarely enough. This is where other ways to block unwanted ads are applied:
- Block banners of specified dimensions.
- Define the dimensions of banners to be blocked. In this case the application will block not only banners of standard, generally used dimensions (such as 468x60, 88x31, etc.), but also of any other as specified by the user. For greater flexibility of ad blocker settings, it would be useful to define a dimension range so as to block banners with dimensions slightly different from standard.
- Ignore loading graphics from other domains.
Banners and other ads often take up a lot of useful space on the page, thus stretching the page to a few screens and making it very inconvenient for viewing. The remedy for such cases is shrinking the area previously taken up by ads. The figure below clearly illustrates the effect of applying page compression at the cost of ads.
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