You’re free to use software to manipulate what does and doesn’t appear on your own screen. Just as you’re free to mute your television or go make a cup of tea during an ad break, you have no obligation to pay attention to any advertising online.

If any of these ad blockers malfunction and a site stops loading correctly, just right click on the extension’s icon in the top-right of your web browser to temporarily disable it, then refresh the page.Īd blockers are perfectly legal. Since we first included Cookie Notice Blocker in our list of the best ad blockers, we’ve noticed it can cause certain sites to behave strangely. It also blocks pop-ups asking you to subscribe to newsletters or allow notifications. But rather than stop doing it, those companies instead bamboozle users with incomprehensible permission forms which they hope you’ll blindly accept.Ĭookie Notice Blocker does a decent job of blocking most of these notices, and doesn’t give your consent to be tracked by third-party advertising trackers. GDPR rules make it unlawful for companies to use third-party cookies to track your online behaviour without your consent. We’ll give an honourable mention to this Chrome extension for blocking cookie notices, which are perhaps the most frustrating aspect of using the internet today.

This means free sites can continue to make money and pay their staff. You can also configure ad blockers to allow some non-intrusive advertising to appear – such as ads that don’t block any content or play any sound – or to whitelist websites you want to support. The most powerful ad blockers can remove YouTube video advertising and even scrub sponsored posts from your social media feed. To eradicate these and other forms of digital advertising you need a dedicated blocker. Your web browser is already designed to block the very worst types of malicious advertising – like those spammy pop-up windows that plagued the early internet – but modern advertisers use more sophisticated techniques to get their ads in front of you. This allows your web browser to accept the useful parts of a website and filter out the rest. In the most basic sense, ad blockers work by checking all of the content that appears in your web browser against a giant list of URLs known to host advertising, then simply not running the code required to display the advertising in your browser window.

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