Recently I've been getting assaulted by these annoying Vibrant popup
advertisements. They sort of look like hyperlinks, but with a double underscore, and if
you accidentally mouse over them, a new little window pops up blocking the document you're
reading with an annoying advertisement. When you load a page, Vibrant scans the
document your browsing and searches for keywords matching a database of sponsors. So if
you're reading a web page about computer gaming, it'll find the word game and turn
it into a advertising opportunity for the Microsoft X-Box 360.
Generally, I don't care that much about ads. I'm usually able to tune out most ads on a page while browsing. But Vibrant provides a new definition of obnoxious, a throwback to the whack-a-mole era of popups. It's another step in the old arms race between advertisers and the rest of us--while we just want to read a web page for the content, they're continually trying to make a buck by blitzing us with advertisements, and are always a little too crafty at finding loopholes in our browsers to do it.
Now at this point you might ask, "Gee Steve, why are you affected by ads at all, surely you're using Firefox and Adblock Plus, right?" The truth is I don't, I use Safari. While I agree that Firefox has superior features (notably, a wealth of addons that block ads, or aid with web app development), I simply like Safari better. It's faster, and I think it looks nicer (certainly versus Firefox on the Mac) and is generally more pleasant for day-to-day web browsing. And a lot of pople don't know it, but Safari has some development tools of its own, you can enable the Debug menu for debugging JavaScript, observing page behavior/correctness, and tuning performance.
Until my recent Leopard upgrade, I'd been using Saft ($12), which in addition to some basic ad blocking capabilities offered a number of bonus features, such as warnings before closing a window with multiple tabs, restoring all windows from a previous browser session, etc. When Leopard came out there was a lot of confusion regarding Mac OS's InputManagers (I think it's pretty well-understood now), and Saft wasn't quite ready out the gate. I realized fairly quickly however that the new Safari had most if not all of these features I liked built-in. (Update: I see now that Saft has been updated and appears to work fine, however I noticed it didn't appear to block Vibrant ads out of the box. Hah, oh well).
While looking around I found what seemed like a compelling, cross-browser solution: Privoxy, a junk-busting proxy you run on your computer (or centralized on your network if you want) that cleans up your pages. For Mac users, it offers an easy solution: download, install, and update your proxy settings and you're ready to go. However I found it wasn't quite that easy, after a bit of troubleshooting I found I had to edit /Library/StartupItems/Privoxy/Privoxy and change the daemonuser field to match a valid user on the system (in my case, stevek). And then, I found the proxy bypass field in the Mac OS System Preferences didn't quite behave as well as I wanted, it was still using the proxy for machines on my company's intranet. I ended up learning how to write a Proxy Auto Config (PAC) file to give me exactly what I wanted. It's kind of neat, you can read up on PAC files starting at this Wikipedia page, or check out the proxy.pac I came up with.
Here's an example before and after of an page with ads. Compare this to what you see.
Unfortunately I started getting strange application crashes, an annoying popup every hour stating The Application PubSubAgent quit unexpectedly. Some forums suggested it was an Apple bug and proxy-related. And then periodically even Safari would crash on me. And then I remembered, I hate proxies--especially corporate transparent proxies. I'd say this approach to ad blocking is a great idea in theory but experience has told me that proxies just suck--give me clean, unobstructed access to my web pages.
Finally just today I stumbled on what looks like a promising project: Safari AdBlock. Its tag line is
"Couldn't be more simple", and so far, I'd have to agree. There's virtually zero
documentation, and no way to customize it, just the claim that "it just works out of the
box". I'd like to know more about how it works, so I browsed through the source
a little, and noted the special thanks to AdBlock
Plus and EasyList, so it looks it this
leverages these existing, excellent products. Good stuff. I revisited various pages to
check for ads (notably the
one that launched this recent crusade), and it's clear Safari AdBlock is silently
working. It's free, it looks like it's doing a good job, and it's very small and
lightweight--all good things.
Goodbye, obnoxious Vibrant ads. Can't wait to (not) see what you come up with next.