Chrome with AD Block ?

[Rickosw]

Hi Guys,

Does Chrome extension with AD BLOCK work with Surface 3?

what other web browsers will you recommend that has AD BLOCK type of features as well?

Thanks!

 

[cygnus11]

I use Chrome with ad block on my Surface 3 all the time. It works perfectly.

 

[Dewg]

Just replace your hosts file. No ads on any browser.

 

[iSherifs]

Just replace your hosts file. No ads on any browser.

Could you please elaborate?

 

[Dewg]

Could you please elaborate?

Sure - This site has a custom "hosts" file you can use in Windows which will block virtually all ads from your system no matter which browser you use. It's based on the TCP/IP stack (which every OS uses - you can do this on Mac, Linux, etc.) which looks at a "hosts" file to see if you have any custom IP address for a domain. If it doesn't find it in the hosts file, it goes to DNS to look it up.

So this custom hosts file has entries for thousands and thousands of known ad servers and domains and re-directs them to 0.0.0.0 (nowhere).

The process involves you backing up your empty hosts file and replacing it with their modified version. Yes, it will slow down processing a tad - but with modern quad-core processors, I very seriously doubt you'll feel it. If anything you'll feel a massive increase in performance as webpages load without annoying flash-based ads (sucking battery power).

Edit: I'll give you an example.

You browse to: www.yahoo.com
Your Windows PC will look at the hosts file and see if there is an entry for "yahoo.com", translating it to an IP address. If not, it looks your ISP's DNS (or whatever DNS server you use) to translate.
Now - Yahoo starts loading. However, the Yahoo page has some content from Yahoo and other content on the page from other servers (typically ads).
Again, for every element on the Yahoo page that references a domain (www.adserver.com - for example), your PC looks at the hosts file - and if not found, looks at DNS to render that information.

Since the modified hosts file has an entry for "adserver.com" pointed to 0.0.0.0 (nowhere), that place on the Yahoo page that should show an ad, now says "This site cannot be displayed" or "404: not found". No more ads, no more slow down flash animation, no more data loss while your browser starts streaming some video ad, etc.