Wired Sage

In my quest to upgrade my apple experience I have tried to leave Firefox behind and use Safari in Snow Leopard. One of the things I loved about FireFox was AdBlock. I can’t tell you how much Internet advertising annoys me. Well, I could try to tell you, but you’d get bored and stop reading, so I’ll spare you. Let’s just say it REALLY ANNOYS ME!

Nowhere does it annoy me worse than on facebook. If you use facebook, I’m sure you see the ads every time you view a page. The ones that irk me the most are the photos of girls in bikinis for the sites that say, “Who’s been googling you?” As if girls in bikinis are googling you. Ha!

So, to remove advertising using Safari on a Mac I installed GlimmerBlocker Proxy. Installing it creates an entry in your System Preferences.

Glimmer Blocker in System Preferences

Glimmer Blocker runs a proxy on your local machine and sets Safari up to use that proxy to connect to the Internet. It’s a wonderfully elegant setup because it doesn’t hack Safari to do the ad removal. Inside the Glimmer Proxy configuration you can subscribe to several default filters which makes getting setup quick and easy.  You’ll be blocking most advertisers immediately with little to no effort at all.

Subscribe to default filters

What it didn’t do well out of the box, so to speak, is block the advertising in facebook.  I investigated and saw that Glimmer Blocker could do transformations — change the content of websites before sending the data to Safari.  What I didn’t find is an easy way to rip out the <div> tags that surrounded the Facebook Ads.  An email to the developer got me on the right track.  Instead of transforming the data, adding cascading stylesheets and javascript entries could stop the ads from displaying.

I have created my own personal filter to remove Facebook Advertising and I’m publishing it here for you to benefit from.  All you have to do is select the top little gear icon under the Filters and choose Subscribe to filter.

Subscribe to my Facebook Filter

In the window that opens just type in “http://wiredsage.com/Media/facebook_filter.xml”.

Subscribe to my Facebook Filter

Important Note: you should trust me before doing this! So, I’m putting the contents of my rule here for you to see:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<filter-data name="Facebook Ad Removal" format-version="3" gb-version="1.4.4">

<rule rule-id="950390245" priority="5" host="facebook.com" host-type="domain" type="modify" whitelist="1">

<css><![CDATA[.adcolumn { display: none; }

.ssponsor { display: none; }

.pagelet_adbox { display: none; }

.emu_sponsor { display: none; }]]></css>

<js placement="head-end"><![CDATA[function(){

var a = document.getElementsByClass('UIHomeBox');

while (a.length) {

if (a[0].parentNode)

a[0].parentNode.removeChild(a[0]);

}

var a = document.getElementsByClass('emu_sponsor');

while (a.length) {

if (a[0].parentNode)

a[0].parentNode.removeChild(a[0]);

}

}]]></js></rule></filter-data>

Keep me honest.  Download the file first to see if it matches.  Or download it and make your own.  I’ll probably update the file in place, since the actual contents of the XML file are published here as a historical record of what the file used to look like.  If you don’t want to get updates, choose the appropriate radio buttons on the last screen above.

I hope someone finds this useful.  I know I personally like facebook much better without the annoying, misleading and uninteresting advertising.