Nobody likes advertisements on websites. Big animated banners and flash ads slow down the entire web surfing experience and they can be a real pain especially if you are still stuck on dial up like me. Fortunately there is a simple and safe solution. You just need to download two things and you’ll never suffer a pop up or see an ugly banner again.

• Firefox web browser – Firefox includes pop up and pop under ad blocking and an extendable architecture that allows you to add functionality to it. There are hundred of free firefox extensions available. Firefox also supports tabbed browsing which allows you to open multiple web pages under different tabs in a single Firefox window. This helps reduce onscreen clutter
• Adblock Plus – This is one of the most popular firefox extensions and with good reason. Adblock removes ads according to filters specified in a blacklist file. You can specify your own filters and/or subscribe to publicly available optmised blacklists. Your subscriptions are automatically updated thereby ensuring that you rarely see any ads.

Together these two downloads can stop almost all ads.