PC Tonic

Many web pages have a considerable amount of text and flash ads embedded into them. This not only makes those pages look irritating, but also increases the page loading time considerably on slow connections. Ad blockers come to the rescue by implanting themselves into your favorite browser and blocking most of these annoying ads automatically, thereby improving readability and saving a lot of bandwidth. Firefox users have the extremely powerful AdBlock Plus extension, while Internet Explorer 7 users get this facility (and lots more) through IE7Pro.

AdSweep is yet another effective ad blocker that supports many browsers like Firefox 3.5+, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, and specifically the last two. It’s basically a small user JavaScript with no fancy “click-and-use” options, and you’ll have to do a bit of copy-paste hacking to embed it to either browser (this is mostly due to Chrome’s lack of support for active plug-ins, and Opera’s close-source structure). No need to worry though, detailed installation instructions are available in the home page.

AdSweep claims to have better blocking capabilities than AdBlock Plus, as it can recognize almost any type of ad by applying advanced filters based on common patterns that are specific to ads. Moreover, AdSweep is open source and flexible enough to follow custom user-created rules.

I would say AdSweep is still a bit rough for the average user, but it’s certainly a great add-on for Chrome and Opera if you can get through the installation process.