A better way to get rid of ads and spyware while browsing

I have used lots of ad blockers over the years. Unfortunately, many of them are tied to a specific browser or a specific operating system. Life is further complicated on Windows because so many applications use browser "widgets" behind the scenes. For example, if you use the popular Adblock Plus extension in Firefox, it doesn't help when you are using an application like TurboTax or Media Player that fires up an IE behind the scenes.

So nowadays I replace my system's hosts file with one that effectively gives a bogus IP address for any site associated with advertising, cookie tracking, and other nefarious incursions on your privacy. The beauty of this approach is:

1. It blocks access to these ad/spyware servers from any/all programs on your machine.
2. It isn't specific to a specific program or operating system. It is equally effective on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, whatever.
3. Simple - no proxy servers to maintain, no utilities to update.
4. Doesn't consume any resources on my machine - no ram, cpu, nothin.
5. Also blocks cookies from creepy money-grubbing spy/spam oriented companies.
   

Give it a try; complete instructions and an excellent blocking hosts file to use can be found here.

In addition to installing the above hosts file, I do recommend that you use FireFox over Internet Explorer as your default day-to-day browser. Your Windows machine will thank you, trust me. Assuming you do, I suggest a couple of small extra steps to get rid of error messages and "server not available" popups when creepy javascripts discover they cannot communicate with ad spamming servers. In the FireFox Address Bar enter about:config, then scroll down to browser.xul.error_pages.enabled and set change it to False. Next, scroll down to the setting dom.max_script_run_time, and set this one to 1800.

Enjoy, and as always please post a comment to let me know your thoughts.