Best Free Ad Blocking Software Review
Posted by Dexter Nelson: Monday, December 29, 2014 (6:20 PM)
What's The Best Free Ad Blocking Software?
Aside from being a small business owner, I am a musician, a Perl developer and an avid video gamer. As a result, I'm always online doing something either for work or for myself, which is great, but it also comes with a very big headache.
... Ads!
We're all used to ads by now. They're everywhere and on just about everything. With that said, have you noticed that this year especially, it seems like every popular site is loaded with ads, pop ups, alerts and re-directs?
And some sites have adopted this format where you have to click for the next image, or video or whatever. They'll give you a list like top 10 reasons why xxx, or top 20 this, or top 50 that, and what do they do?
Make you click several times to go from one to the next and EVERY PAGE is loaded with ads.
It's bad enough that I have to click 40 or 50 times to read an article about the top 20 one thing or another, but every page is full of ads. Even on a brand new computer that's just a few months old, about half way through the sites themselves drag on forever to load, and sometimes not at all while it's trying to load stuff from other sites.
So, for the sake of my own sanity and faster browsing I decided to test many different types of ad blocking software. Not pop up blockers, but ad blocking software - software that will stop ads from loading on sites.
... and I didn't want to download another "secure" browser either.
Now there are several of them, (both free and paid), so I picked six of that showed promise based on their descriptions and features and let each one have a go for six weeks (one week each).
Note: I stayed away from browser specific software as well as browser addons.
The five I tested are:
1. AdBlock Plus
2. Super AdBlocker
3. Ad Muncher
4. Ad Fender
5. Emma Ad Blocker
6. AdGuard
I won't go into details about each and just talk a bit about the one I think is the best.
As busy as I am, and as often as I am online there were a few musts that I required for what I would consider the best free ad blocking software, and here are those five factors:
1. Light on system resources
2. Not invasive with pop ups of their own
3. Easy to configure and navigate
4. Can allow exemptions (some sites like Hulu use paid ads)
5. Works with any ad source, not just a few.
The best free ad blocking software that met with my personal requirements was AdFender.
It's light-weight, very passive, works in the background, doesn't give annoying notifications; it's easy to configure, can be enabled/disabled and has yet to fail in blocking anything I threw at it.
That choice was easy considering that Emma Ad Blocker and AdGuard are also pretty solid, but in the end I chose AdFender for a very unusual reason (at least to many). It allows me to launch into Adminsitrator Mode right from the task bar.
As a developer, some applications I run require administrator permissions (even in the browser), so with all of the others, I had to keep exiting the program and re-launching in Administrator mode.
With AdFender, I didn't have to do that, and the fact it looks professional is only a bonus.
To find out more about AdFender and begin nuking ads on your PC, follow the link below to their site.
Visit the best free ad blocking software, AdFender >>
Do you have a favorite ad blocking software?
Leave a comment below and let us know what it is!
