The last solution is being used by the small application IE Commercial Remover which adds known advertising hosts to the restricted zone so that connection attempts to those hosts will be rejected by the web browser. This in return means that the ads that should be displayed on the website will not be displayed due to that.

The portable software program displays a simple interface upon startup. Its three buttons can be used to add the filters to the restricted zone in Internet Explorer, remove the filters again and to close the application.

IE Commercial Remover is a simple small application that can add a wide range of servers to IE’s restricted zone sites. This prevent the servers to communicate with IE. The result is that no banner or other commercials (flash etc) will load from these sites. – It is all done with one click. The application does NOT come with an installer (it is not required) – Simply run the file, and click on Add Filter to IE, and you are done.

The program will add a total of seven different ad serving hosts to the restricted zone in the web browser. That’s not much considering that usual ad blocking lists contain hundreds of hosts. The method itself however is less intrusive than installing a plugin or third party software to handle ad blocking.

IE commercial Remover can be downloaded from the developer’s website. The developer does not provide compatibility information. It worked flawlessly on a Windows 7 Professional test system.

We would like to encourage you to post additional tips and hints about website manipulation in the comments of this article so that the page becomes as comprehensive as possible. All methods of manipulating websites have been tested with Firefox 3.5x and 3.0.x. Most will probably also work in previous versions of the web browser.

1. Userscripts and Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey and its userscripts are probably the most popular and known method of manipulation website contents in real time. Thousands of userscripts exist that add, remove or modify elements and features of web services. Some classic examples are changing the design of Gmail, adding new features to the Internet Movie Database IMDB or skipping the wait time at popular file hosts.

Generation of scripts requires web development knowledge, especially of html, JavaScript and CSS as these are used to alter the contents of the websites.

2. Platypus – Modify Websites Without Programming Skills

Platypus allows a user to modify websites with any programming skill requirements. This limits the reach of the Firefox add-on a bit as it is not possible to reach the depth of Greasemonkey. Possible options are to permanently remove elements from websites, change style attributes, change the font and background colors to black and white or to remove fixed sizes and positioning on a page.

3. Stylish – Modify CSS

The Stylish add-on for Firefox and its accompanying userstyles directory provide access to new styles that manipulate the CSS of a website.It can be used to remove, add, move and manipulate elements on a website permanently. The screenshot above shows the popular Atistic Google userstyle.

4. Yet Another Remove It Permanently

Yet Another Remove It Permanently is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that makes it possible to remove elements on websites permanently. Can for example be used to remove advertisement from Google Search results or images from websites. Basically any element can be removed with this add-on. A similar add-on is Nuke Anything Enhanced.

5. Firebug

Firebug is first and foremost an add-on for Firefox that presents lots of useful information to web developers. What many do not know is that it comes with the capabilities to manipulate elements on a website. It is probably not the first choice for this kind of manipulations but this comes in handy when testing different kinds of layouts, color combinations or fonts.

6. NoScript and Adblock Plus

Both the NoScript and the Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox are primarily being used to prevent scripts and advertisements from being displayed on the user’s computer monitor. This does make them limited tools for modifying websites.

7. Aardvark

Aardvark can be used to isolate or remove elements from websites.Has been primarily been designed to remove unneeded elements before printing a website.

Verdict:

There are definitely a lot possibilities to modify websites in Firefox; Certainly more than have been mentioned in this post. Probably the easiest possibilities are in the form of Greasemonkey. If you know of any additional add-ons that should be mentioned let us know in the comments.

Adblock IE provides an easier approach that is offering the same results. It comes with a setup to install a browser helper object (BHO) in Internet Explorer 8. This object will manage the ad blocking in Internet Explorer. The add-on for Internet Explorer 8 is in an early stage which means it does not provide access to a graphical user interface or any options at all at this point in time. The ad blocking works fine on the other hand and this is basically what counts the most.

The developer plans to bring the functionality of both Adblock Plus and NoScript to Internet Explorer 8 that can be controlled from within the web browser. Adblock IE provides the means to block ads in Internet Explorer 8 right now with good prospect to provide a better usability and advanced features in the future. It could become a must have application for Internet Explorer 8. The program is compatible with Internet Explorer 8 and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 to be installed

To test if the add-on is installed properly do the following after Installation:

• Open Internet Explorer 8
• Click on Tools > Manage Add-ons
• Make sure Toolbars and Extensions is selected
• Scroll down until you see af0.Adblock.BHO with the status Enabled

You need to visit the project page for information about new versions of the Internet Explorer 8 add-on though.

While that surely works it is not the same as to simply flip a switch and have the ad blocking functionality. This is currently not possible in Google Chrome but it is possible in its Open-Source pendant SRWare Iron. Iron is based on the Chromium source that is also used in Google Chrome. The advantages of Iron are increased privacy and security.

What many users do not know is that it is possible to enable ad blocking in the Iron browser. This is done by downloading a file called adblock.ini from the developers homepage and copying that file into the main SRWare Iron directory replacing the blank file of the same name.

The adblock.ini file contains information to block hundreds of advertisers, included are all the popular advertising companies like Google and Yahoo.

Update: A lot has changed in the last two years. Google Chrome is now supporting extensions, and several adblockers have been created for the browser to hide advertisement on websites.

Among the options are ScriptNo, an extension that blocks all scripts from running automatically in the web browser, or Adblock Plus, one of the most popular adblockers on today’s Internet.

Both extensions block ads in the Chrome browser. They do come with options to let some ads through and only block annoying or irritating advertisements.

Two new right-click entries appear after installing the add-on for Firefox, which currently does not support Firefox 3.01 but can be forced to be compatible. The first entry, Remove This Permanently, removes the selected element from the current page. If you remove the Google logo from a search it will still appear on a different search. This method is pretty good for quickly removing elements on a website that you visit regularly and that does not have changing addresses.

The second entry Rip Advanced offers advanced features that make it possible to remove elements from a single page, all similar pages, the website and the full domain. That’s not all however. You can also remove all similar items in one go, remove the parent element, all parent elements, all frames and Google Adsense.

A few remarks about the process: It’s pretty difficulty to remove flash elements from a website because you cannot right-click in the elements. They display a different menu. This means you have to click close to them and hope that Rip picks them as the default element that should be removed. A red border appears around the element that would get removed which is a good visual aid.

Elements that are removed do still get downloaded and appear in the cache. This is therefor no method to save bandwidth.

The primary use for Rip would be to remove nerve wrecking elements from websites that you visit regularly. Before you start now and remove advertisements from my website I ask you to consider this before you do it. They pay my bills. If everyone would remove them I would not be able to maintain that blog. And they pay for every pageview. This is also a tip for every Adblock user who is visiting my site. If you want to support me disable Adblock on my website. I do not have popups, layer ads or any other disturbing ads of that kind on my pages. It would help me tremendously on the other hand.

The filter list grows over time, I know mine does and becomes ineffective this way due to duplicate entries and ineffective usage of space in the filter list. Thankfully though the Adblock website offers a way to optimize this filter list to make it more effective. Before you can start with the optimization you need to export your current filter list.

Press CTRL + SHIFT + A to open Adblock Plus. Click on Filters > Export Filters to save the filter list as a text document. Now load the Adblock Plus optimization website and paste the contents of the saved filtered list into the form.

The default options that are available at the bottom should be sufficient for most users. Just make sure you check Optimize including preexisting RegExes if you already have an optimized version but added new filters to that one. Click on the optimize button which should display some stats and of course the new optimized filter list.

Now copy and paste the new filter list into a text document and import it again into Adblock Plus. Press CTRL + SHIFT + A again and click on Filters > Import Filters. Select the text document that contains the updated filter list and click ok. Make sure you select Overwrite when asked if you want to overwrite or append the filter list.

My filter list, which only contained 12 lines and 364 chars was reduced to 1 line and 251 chars which means a reduction of 91.7 % and 31 %.

Update:

Wladimir Palant from Adblock Plus contacted me and told me that Adblock Plus users should use the following two scripts if they want to optimize their filter list:

http://adblockplus.org/en/deregifier
http://adblockplus.org/en/redundancy_check