There are two schools of thought when it comes to online advertising. The first is that it’s intrusive, wastes precious bandwidth and ought to be stopped or blocked at all costs. Seems logical at first glance, but think about the second school of thought: most of the content provided for free on the internet wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for advertising – if you don’t want to pay for content, then surely allowing the site in question to display advertising is the least it can expect in return? Ultimately, there’s a question of whether or not you’re effectively stealing content by blocking the very adverts that allow that content to be there in the first place. It’s a moral – and ultimately financial – argument that’s set to run and run.

AdBlock doesn’t really go with the second argument – at least not in its default state: once installed, reload any web page and you’ll see the ads have gone. All you have to do now is choose whether or not to display the icon in your taskbar and whether or not to allow Google text ads to be displayed where they appear.

If some ads continue to appear that you wish to block, or you actually want to support certain websites by allowing them to display advertisements on their pages, you can tweak these settings from inside the program’s extended configuration options, accessible by clicking the spanner icon and choosing Tools > Extensions.