Adblocking & Websurfing on Speed!

[Mat]

As many of you will know, there are none of the fancy adblockers for our webbrowsers at Mac OS 9. Even if there are some tries to implement adblocking into Classilla, there is recently no good solution. When we are talking about other browsers like iCab or Opera 6.03 there is no possibility at all.

BUT our Mac OS has an old technique already included, that I like to push a little bit.

It is called "hostfiles". Basically it is a textlist, that has domainnames and sends them not to a DNS but to the own computer itselve. So the ads are not loaded as the computer does not connect to any server.

"Under Mac OS 9 and earlier there is a hosts file in the root level of the system folder. If you're using Open Transport it can also be located inside System Folder:Preferences, although either will work. Or you can just open the TCP/IP control panel and go into Advanced under User Mode in the Edit menu. Then you have the option of choosing whatever hosts file you like and it will be put where it needs to be."

These textlists with the adservers can be in two formats:

Either: "doubleclick.net. A 127.0.0.1" (with the periode!)
or:  "doubleclick.net CNAME 0.0.0.0"

If you create such a hostfile textlist (or edit an existing one), and include all the adservers, you will surf without ads, and quite fast with every browser or internetapplication, even the very old ones. And if you include the real monsters like google.com (use duckduckgo.com, or an locale google), as facebook.com and all the stuff, you will wonder how fast the net can be even at our 300 MHz machines!

And now there comes the best part; there are sites collecting this adservers! And some of them are providing these well maintained and recent textlists in Mac OS 9 formats as well. One of them is here: http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/
So you simply have to go there, let show you the recent list (e.g. http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=machosts ), copy&paste it to a textfile, save this at your harddisk -> Systemfolder as "hosts", and select this textfile in TCP/IP Control Panel.

Have fun with your speedy and adfree webexperiance again!

[Knez]

Great tip, Mat!

[Mat]

Yes, I am using it for a long time. And most time I forget about it. Now that I setup the new HD last time, I had again a system without this hostfile, and was wondering the other way - how incredible slow everythign becomes with that adservers.

I would be interrested what you guys think, when you created your own hostfile.
As well it would be nice to send other adservers to these collector, if you find some that are not included.

[supernova777]

i have a hosts file i can share.. perhaps we could merge using some type of text compare/merge tool - think bbedit would do that?

[MacTron]

Thank you Mat, very good tip!