Block ads, flash and other annoyances with a few mouse clicks [Opera Trick]
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We’ve previously covered ad-blocking tools for all the major browsers :
- IE7Pro for Internet Explorer
- AdBlock Plus for Firefox
- AdSweep for Chrome, Opera, and Safari
All these tools work great, but if you’re an Opera user you can actually block ads using the browser’s built in features! Let’s see how :
- On visiting a web page that contains some obnoxious ads (say our own PC Tonic!), right click anywhere within the Opera window and select “Block Content…”
- The entire page will instantly fade out except for the blockable items (ads, flash, images etc.). All you’ve to do is to click on the elements you want to block. This will add a filter and Opera will block similar elements from all websites. If you’d rather block a single item, hold the Shift button while clicking on it.
Considering there are a large number of advertising services (AdSense, AdBrite, Chitika, Widget Bucks…) it’ll take some time to build up a commendable list of filters. However once done, you can conveniently surf through websites without having to see those ugly, bandwidth-sucking ads or horrendous auto-playing flash videos. You can view all your blacklisted content through Tools > Advanced > Blocked Content…, where you can also add website URLs to be blocked.
Opera might be the dark horse of the Big browsers, but it continues to impress with it’s rich feature set.
