Feb 15, 2004 06:29 PM
6456 Views
(Updated Mar 24, 2004 09:08 PM)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I request you to kindly look at this web-page... (the one which you are alreday looking at) Look at it carefully. On the right-side of the page you would probably see a woman asking you to ''Show your true face to the World'' or ''make a wish'' (as if she's going to grant it), at the end of the page you have several giggling women who have no tales to tell, so they promptly update their profiles and at the center, you have this text, the only sensible thing on the whole page, if I may take the liberty of saying so.
If you spend may be, a minute to think about how much ''garbage'' is being thrown at you as you browse, site after site, page after page... you will probably agree with me if I say half the bandwidth of your internet connection is eaten up by this kind of stuff. Images, animations look cool but they take up most of your bandwidth. If you right click on that pretty woman's nose and see her properties, you will discover that the woman costs you... may be.. 10 KB. And this text? At most 5 or 6 KB. And adding up the sizes of all those cute logos and banners the whole page would easily take up 50KB. So, on this particular website, the one which has such a low level of graphics, no third party ADs, not much animation and color, the useful stuff to garbage ratio is 1:9. Think about: rediff, yahoo, CNN and other commercial sites... These chaps seem to be determined to drive you crazy as you watch the pages loading
5%.... 23%..... 47%...... 72%...... 93%.... and at last 100%....
esp. on a dial up connection. And so what if you have fast cable or DSL?? After all, your quota is limited. You can only view so many GBs per month. Why should you pay for garbage? There seems to be no way out.... Well, it's not really so. You can outwit these guys by browsing smartly.
Get Avant browser.
https://avantbrowser.com/
It's such a cute cute software. It blocks Flash, advertisements, popups and keeps your webpage neet and clean. It's my personal experience that browsing was speeded up considerably with Avant. All you have to do is to get Avant and add these addresses in the AD blocker.
ad.adsmart.net
ad.doubleclick.net
ads.lycos.com
ads.msn.com
ads.smartclicks.com
ads.zdnet.com
us.yimg.com (Yahoo.com ADs)
in.yimg.com (yahoo.co.in ADs)
See:
https://home.alamedanet.net/~leighb/bestsurf.htm
https://ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/spam/adblock.shtml
for more.
And that's not all. It has plenty of good features like:
Multi-Window interface:
Browse 10 different sites within a single window. Does not eat up RAM as IE does. You can also switch from one site to another by using the Tabs at the bottom.
Great looks:
With variety of skins available, you can ''dress up'' your browser the way you want.
Safe Recovery:
Normally it won't, but if by some great misfortune, Avant Browser crashes, all web pages are saved and will be automatically reopened at next startup. So, you will get everything back... as it was.
Well, I got it just about 15 days back and I'm still in the process of ''reviewing'' the software and hence 'm not able to write much at this point of time. But I WILL add more as I explore.. so keep checkin... bye...
- This page actually tells you about the popular Hosts file trick to block ADs; which is precisely the way how Avant works. So, if you do not wish to download/use Avant but still wish to block ADs you can do it by modifying the Hosts file as per the instructions given there. The trick may not work with your school/office computer if you use a proxy server. In that case, you need to add these addresses in the Do-not-use-proxy-server-for-these-addresses box, which is just below the place where you specify your proxy server.
(c) Amey Purandare.
