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Absolutely. It boggles the mind why anyone would use a plug-in to block ads when a hosts file tweak is all you need.
/ravi
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Seems reasonable, I looked for something that:
- Would work with all the browsers.
- That could not be disabled (by a normal user).
- Which would block unwanted ads.
Probably what @BillWoodruff says about a better filtering on this kind of ad blockers is true, but hosts file satisfies my needs perfectly.
And isn't it amazing to see a web without ads?
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0) Easier to troubleshoot and work around problems.
0.0) 1 click to turn off and see if it was the problem.
0.1) Ability to see everything blocked and toggle rules 1 at a time to figure out which is he problem.
1) Ability to set different rules for different sites.
2) Ability to block some but not all content from a domain.
2.0) CDNs hosting ads and legit content.
2.1) Sites hosting ads under locations where dns blocking won't work, eg something like www.codeproject.com/ads/ but on a site you want to use ad blocking on.
2.2) Ability to block useless non-ad content from a page. - back before Google buried it under Stack Overflow results this made Expert Sexchange pages usable without scrolling down past 500 screens of "ugentz giv uss teh moneyz 4 da cod" begging first.
3) No holes in layout where failed to load ads were placed.
2.2 and 3 are the two most important reasons for me; and why despite being aware of the performance implications, I'm mostly writing DOM based blocking rules instead of host based rules in my custom filter list these days.3
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Hi Joan,
I've been using the MVPS Hosts file for years; I do have the impression that using AdBlockPlus does block out ads that are not intercepted by the Hosts file. I have assumed that's because ABP has listings for that the Hosts file does not ... what do you think ?
cheers, Bill
«A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards ... as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push» Wittgenstein
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No idea Bill, I've never used a plugin to block ads  (I'm using IE  ), I started searching for a solution to avoid seeing ads (for myself and for all the people in the company as I saw that most of the virus issues came from unwanted clicks on some "interesting" ads). As we don't have a policy about which browser we have to use I searched for a global option and I found MVPS which worked like charm in all the browsers that can be installed on the computer (of course)...
Probably you are right and an ad blocker will intercept more things as it can use different methods than only the hosts file approach.
and an ad too early for that here...
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That's what I use as well, but it tends to slow down browsing as well.
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I have always assumed that using the Hosts file must have some overhead if it filters out certain browsing activity as pages load ... how could it not have overhead ?
cheers, Bill
«A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards ... as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push» Wittgenstein
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The overhead is incurred by a failing 404, which while definitely non-zero is (for all practical purposes, IMHO) negligible.
/ravi
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: but it tends to slow down browsing
Is that right? can you see a big impact on the browsing speed?
Probably I've not noticed it as I installed it while we had an ultra-slow-adsl-which-never-reached-800kb-of-download-speed  and now that we do have optical fiber we are already used to the delay caused by the altered hosts file...
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Not much impact here, and I'm aggregating a few of them.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I'll take slower over ads any day! Its worth it!
Hogan
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I agree completely. I don't use any other plug-ins, but I won't go without ABP
I will wait so that I don't get hit with commercials all the time. I don't listen to commercial radio, I pay for music accounts to go add free, I don't watch commercial television or subscribe to services that have commercials.
All this because I don't want to be hit with adds all the time. So I should be able to be on the web without ads.
Elephant elephant elephant, sunshine sunshine sunshine
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So, would you be willing to sign up for a paid subscription to CodeProject if we didn't display Ads? And if so, how much? Without Ad revenue, how do you expect sites such as CodeProject to keep the lights on?
Please note that we try to make sure that all Ads displayed on the site are on topics that would interest developers, admins, database admins, designers and software architects. Personally, I may ignore most Ads, but there is the occasional gem that is just what I was looking for, even if I wasn't looking.
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See that's part of the thing. CP adds never bothered me. They were well placed, and at least relevant.
Other sites spam me with adds in my face that are for things I've already purchases, looked up for someone else, etc.
Elephant elephant elephant, sunshine sunshine sunshine
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No, but that's why I've signed up for all your news letters and don't use any adblockers. (My brain is usually more efficient for adblocking in any case.)
But there's a down side to that, you have to develop your site for IE aswell. 
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
(√-sh*t) 2
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Something else to keep in mind; it's not that adblock itself is inherently a huge consumer of memory: It's that the mix of global and site specific filters defeats the browsers caching mechanism that would otherwise only have a single copy of the css exist in total; combined with the fact that if you populate your filter list via subscription, instead of a small list suitable for the sites you browse you end up with an enormous list of filters to block the entire internet a few dozen to a few hundred rules to block ads on sites you visit will have an order of magnitude or two less impact than a few thousand rules to also block the 99.9% of the net you never visit.
I don't have any memory usage stats; but I regularly speed up slow slideshow sites by adblocking the crap out of the rest of the page...
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I find this a "chilling" story: [^].
"Little has been discussed in public about U.S. Cyber Command’s specific capabilities since, though budget documents detail a growing commitment to this form of warfare. The Pentagon’s cyberwarfare budget has grown from $3.9 billion in 2013 to $4.7 billion in 2014 and an estimated $5.1 billion in 2015."
"The first commander of U.S. Cyber Command, then-Army Gen. Keith Alexander, gave Congress in 2013 one of its first public overviews of how quickly an offensive cyberwarfare mindset was spreading across the Pentagon. In military parlance, it means “normalizing” cyberoperations into the daily routine.
“We have no alternative but to do so because every world event, crisis and trend now has a cyber-aspect to it, and decisions we make in cyberspace will routinely affect our physical or conventional activities and capabilities as well,” Gen. Alexander told lawmakers."
«OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. » Alan Kay's clarification on what he meant by the term "Object" in "Object-Oriented Programming."
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When the Pentagon levels the playing field, they really level the playing field. 
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And y'all think it's a good idea to connect your fridge.
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Would be kind of fun to have a trained attack fridge that didn't involve me getting pelted with frozen veggies.
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Makes me think of that scene in Maximum Overdrive where the Coke machine was firing cans of coke at the baseball players.
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BillWoodruff wrote: “We have no alternative but to do so because every world event, crisis and trend now has a cyber-aspect to it, and decisions we make in cyberspace will routinely affect our physical or conventional activities and capabilities as well,”
The worlds of William Gibson appears to more and more real every day.
Marc
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