...New to me, anyhow.

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I was browsing this news item (picture above) when a rash of pop-ups appeared. They were advertisements, put there using software from a company called Vibrant. Whenever my cursor went over a double-underlined word or phrase in the article, a small window opened with some advertiser's text in it.

I found this distracting and an affront, so I looked on the Vibrant Web site. This prates about the company's standards and ethics but doesn't tell you how to turn the blasted things off.

A quick Google gave the answer, from a year ago. I use the Firefox browser and found that one of its add-ins will do the trick. It's called Adblock and I already had it installed. It needed an extra something, though, which is a set of filters devised and maintained by the pseudonymous "Rick752″. I recommend them to you.

Installing them is easy. Go to his Web site and progressively click on the links on the left side of the home page. When you've done, you'll find your browsing simpler and less prone to distractions like those above. If you'd like some reassurance on that, read further down Rick's page for examples of what the filters can do.

Pages will have an unfamiliar, denuded look at first but you'll get used to it. As the dog food adverts put it, you'll be getting 100% raw nourishment. You're not being deprived of anything significant.

Special pleading

Advertisers might think differently but I don't buy their argument that this is doing financial harm. I still have the freedom to flip channels when the TV ads come on and to turn over the page in a newspaper. Nobody (so far) has made it compulsory to look at roadside billboards. I expect the same freedoms on the Web.

A sense of proportion is needed, as well. Around 3 million people use EasyList regularly, out of the more than 1.4 billion people connected to the 'Net (see here). That's 0.0000002%. If your business model would be damaged by the absence of such a tiny segment of your potential market, you're in the wrong business.

The entire combination - Firefox, Adblock and EasyList - is free. It is a fine example of and testament to the community spirit that still exists on the Web, despite its insidious commercialization. (None of the above works on Internet Explorer, by the way.)

Postscript

This all may be old news to you, in which case I'm sorry to have wasted your time but pleased you've got the message. It was news to me and, I imagine, will be for a lot of other folk.

There have been 27 million downloads of AdBlock, yet, as I mentioned, 'only' 3 million of EasyList. There's a bit of leeway to be made up.