How To Keep Adservers From Ruining Your Browsing Experience

I had a real problem today with using some of the game sites that I frequent. The pages were taking forever to load. I went into science mode, and started making some observations. You can see the status of your page load in the left side of the status bar in Firefox. Turns out pages were doing fine until they tried to load from something called "servedby.advertising.com". Being the curious type, I was intrigued and googled that phrase. Not much showed up, and even entering that as a url returned nothing. Through piecing some bits of information together, I found that advertising banners were being loaded from servedby. To think that a poorly run adserver can ruin my browsing experience doesn't sit too well with me. But I did stumble on a couple of solutions to this problem. One way is by creating a "hosts" file. This is a file that sits in your C:/Windows folder and requires a little bit of knowledge to set up. Luckily, for you Firefox users, there is a plug in extension that is easy to install, and you control what you want to block. It's called Adblock. You might have a pop up blocker, this is a banner ad blocker. Here is a link to Adblock, and here is a link to a forum page that contains an extensive list of adservers. A note of caution: some adservers may be your friend, and you'll need to visit your favorite sites to make sure you don't block something you really wanted to see. But my tests so far show my pages load MUCH faster, although I notice my own blog page doesn't load everything. So I'll have to tweak a little. Your mileage may vary, all standard disclaimers apply.