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Blocking Ads in Opera (the browser)

Background

Long time member and Saturday regular & presenter Robert Spotswood wrote an article Mozilla Extensions Extending the Browser for the Jan-Mar'04 issue of HAL-PC Magazine http://www.spotswood-computer.net/mozilla_extensions.html.  The first extension he covered was Adblock ("Adblock – Taming Flash Ads").  Needless to say, Adblock sounds like a great addition to a browser.  (See http://adblock.mozdev.org/).  As a result, Robert received an e-mail asking how to do the same thing in Opera.  Since he doesn't use Opera, he referred the question to me.  Here are my answers. 

General Blocking

With hosts

The hosts file trick/method that Robert mentions works on any computer, whether it's running GNU/Linux, Microsoft® Windows, or the Macintosh OS.  Even with the lack of wildcard limitation, it is still a good weapon in your arsenal for the fight against Internet garbage.  If you are interested in this, I reccommend http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/ — the site is well organized and has clear & relatively simple explanations.  http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ is a little more complicated, but also worth looking at.  If either of these sites is more than you asked for, skip them. 

Other Methods

Both sites mentioned above have information on, and links to, other software and methods to fight ads; useful with a variety of OS's & browsers.  If you find them interesting, pursue them; but our purpose here is to discuss an Opera equivalent to Adblock. 

Opera Specific Methods

Pop-up Blocking

Like Mozilla, Opera has built-in pop-up blocking.  It has 4 levels: 

These are conveniently located on the Quick preferences menu (File | Quick preferences or <F12>). 

Turning Off Ad Enablers

Also on the Quick preferences menu (File | Quick preferences or <F12>), are 5 controls that can be set to disable certain features used by ads:  See http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/7/04/ for details. 

The "Beef"

Finally the answer to the original question: 
Yes, Opera has a feature similar to Adblock, it is called "URL filtering" and it is built-in.  So, you don't have to download it, but you do have to set it up yourself.  The instructions are here:  http://schrode.net/opera/url_filtering/index.html.  For better or worse, this is done by editing plain files with a text editor, like Notepad, vi, mcedit, or <shudder>emacs</shudder>.  You will also have to dig down in your directory to find the files.  On the whole, I suspect a GUI type user would prefer the Adblock interface, while command line types will be quite happy with doing the text editing.  I can't say I have done it myself, I only discovered this feature while researching this answer.  However, it looks quite straightforward.  One caveat:  There are Forum reports that describe Opera's URL filtering as "flakey". 

Links

Opera

Other

    And finally a site reccommended by "Modem Bob" —

Helpdesk Policy Note

I have been thinking for some time that HLUG should support multi-platform software, open source or proprietary.  My rationale is that weening a <barf> © Microsoft® Windows </barf> © user from Winder$ only software is a step toward divorcing themselves from the OS.  So here is a small first step down that road. 

-- RickArchibald - 11 Mar 2004

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