Web advertising sucks. Fortunately, there is an easy way for you non-techies to squash most of it: Firefox’s Adblock plug-in. (Geeks may prefer to use privoxy and tor.)

Adblock by default blocks all the main advertising banner sources, like doubleclick.net, etc. Its real functionality, however, lies in your ability to customize it and teach it what are ads and what aren’t, and thereby reduce your online visual clutter.

Suppose you are reading the Guardian online. You see an annoying ad image. So, with Adblock installed, you right-click on the image and select “Adblock Image”.

It will offer you something that looks like this:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/$%rgkfdGSER%^234rTGRE$%6__SOME_JUNK_HERE

You don’t need to worry about what all that junk at the end means, but you have to get rid of it. The reason is this: Adblock will block only exactly what you tell it to. So if a single digit of that junk is different, it won’t get blocked the second time around.

So what you do is this. Delete all that junk so that the url looks like this:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/

now add an asterisk (’*') at the end, like so:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/*

The asterisk (for you non-geeks) means “match any and all junk that follows.” The above test will block everything that comes from ads.guardian.co.uk, thus delivering to you all the bounteous content the Guardian has to offer without the annoying ads or the need to register to see their ad-free site.