AdSubtract & Multiply! (AdSubtract)

Member Name: Technical Tobes

Product:	AdSubtract
Date:	24/10/00 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Speeds up webpage downloading, removes adverts, ensures your privacy

Disadvantages: None really - apart from an extra taskbar tray icon!

This is a brilliant piece of software – and it’s free!

AdSubtract is a little program that works along side your web browser (proxy server for techies!) and filters out banner adverts & cookies from web pages before you download them.

Now, I have to admit, I was a bit sceptical that a program could just remove banner adverts from web pages without causing any problems (e.g. blocking a real part of the website or something), but it works – and it works very well!

This big advantage of this, is that it speeds up the time taken to download a web page, and, of course, gets rid of all the distracting flashing adverts and such like. This dooyoo site for example, AdSubtract has blocked 16 adverts so far & I’ve only been on the site for a few minutes. On my current connection this equates to about 1 minute of download time purely for adverts.

The other thing that AdSubtract can do is block cookies. Most people at this point will be wondering what on earth cooking got to do with the internet! It is a sad fact that the majority of internet users do not know what cookies are & more importantly, the implications of them. Right now, you probably have hundreds of cookies on your PC.

So what is a cookie & why would you want to block them?

Well, a cookie is basically a small file created by a website. Each time you visit the site, the cookie is sent to a fro from your PC to the website. The cookie is used to store various information relating to your usage of the site.

Some cookies can store useful data, such as your ‘favourites’ or account information so that you don’t have to keep entering it into the site. However, by far the most common use for cookies is to keep track of your internet activity. Advertising agencies use this to keep a continually updated database of your activities, if you enter your name & address details to a site connected with that agency, this
can then be cross-referenced with this database & you are likely to find ‘targeted’ junk mail heading your way!
Of course this does raise questions of privacy, I think that all users should be informed that their activities are being monitored.

AdSubtract can block all, some or none of these cookies. It also has the option to automatically blocks the most common ad agency cookies while leaving all others free. You can specify sites to block & sites not but that will take a little initial work.

All this functionality works seamlessly & you soon forget just how many adverts websites used to have! It does put another icon in your task tray (which I don’t really like) but it’s certainly not going to stop me using it!

AdSubtract has 3 different versions, these are…
SE: This is the free one (a full product, but with a limitation of 5 custom sites, i.e. for cookie blocking)
CE: ($14.95 - <£10) As above but without the limitation
PRO: ($29.95 - <£20) As above, but has the ability to stop pop-ups, animations, sound, & can highlight the more dangerous online ‘profiling’ cookies.

I’m happy with the SE version at present, however may well be tempted by the PRO version as I like the idea of stopping those annoying pop-up windows that many sites have. If I go for it, I’ll be sure to update this opinion!

It’s not often a truly useful utility comes along, but this is certainly one of them – a must have – at least the free version!

Thanks for reading (sorry if it’s a bit long!)


**UPDATE**
Ok, so I did it! I bought the full version!
Worth it?
Well, not really, wish I hadn't now - it's all very good but most options you have to turn off or most sites simply won't work properly, the free version had the most useful options in.
The only thing is does give me of real use is the stop pop
-up windows - which on some sites are very annoying. And you can also stop cookies for all sites, only enabling the few you need to (free version limited to 5 sites for this).
So then, get the free version but unlesss you don't mind configuring just about every site you go to or just turning off the other options, don't bother with the PRO version.

Summary: