Dear Friends,
My default browser is firefox 1.5. When I open a saved webpage offline, firefox try to go online for some adds set on the page and doesn't display the content. How can I set firefox to ignore these adds and display the contents? I use Fedora Core 5.
With regards.
--bnchakraborty

There's a couple of ways to do this. You could use an ad blocker or add the site that these ads come from to your hosts file and have it set the IP address to the localhost.

...or you could install Privoxy as an alternate.

I use two extensions to do that: Adblock Plus and Adblock Filterset.G Updater. Adblock Plus blocks elements of webpages based on certain rules. Adblock Filterset.G Updater periodically downloads a set of rules to ensure all your adds are getting blocked. I never see an ad.

I installed the filterset.G thing and now my adblock doesn't work right at all. I read somewhere that the two should not be installed at the same time. Based on what I have ran into, it may be true.

Thought I would mention that.

If you used this approach, you would be suprised to see how many ads there are. Someone has kept a updating version of this host file. Just download it directly. It will works fine.

I think you have to remove adblock and install adblock plus for the filterset.G extension to work.

why install anything? we are not made of ram.

just google "mike's ad blocking hosts file" and download it overwriting your hosts file.

firefox extensions page should have "adblock and no-script" that you can install.

I use adblock and filterset.G without a problem. I tried adblock plus once but didn't like it. I forget why, it was awhile ago. But with adblock and filterset.G, I rarely see an ad.

The hosts file will work, but you do need to keep it updated.
I have no idea how much more RAM would be used by adding this extension, but I can't imagine it would be much. If your hosts file is very large, it will slow down Firefox.

I have a little over 15,000 lines in my hosts file and Mozilla moves right along. It doesn't seem to have slowed anything down here. Anybody that wants a copy of my hosts file can PM me their email address and I will send them a copy. I don't see very many ads. The biggest one I hate is roping that stupid cow on weather.com. I hate that stupid thing.

The reason I want adblock to work again is this, it can block a specific directory that contains ads and not block the whole server like the hosts file does. My adblock does not work any more and all I did was install the filterset.G thing. I can't even get it to unistall itself now.

Later

Thank you all for your kind replies. I have installed adblock plus extension and it's working well.

The best thing to do is to use Opera.

Thanks pAn1k, but that was not his question.

There are these pesky Google ads on my forum (ProBoards) which I never saw while using Windoze because I was running an app called AdSubtract Pro which killed the nasty bastards. However, since coming to Linux and using FF, I've had a hard time finding a combination of tricks to kill those damned ads. I tried AbBlock with a custom filter of the Google ads... no dice. I tried AdBlock Plus with a similar custom filter... no dice. I read a post above here by SweetLou mentioning Filter Set G. I tried it with AdBlock... no dice. I tried it with AdBlock Plus... SUCCESS! No more of those damned Google ads on my forum!

Thanks, Lou!

~Eric