We’ll give an honourable mention to this Chrome extension for blocking cookie notices, which are perhaps the most frustrating aspect of using the internet today. This means free sites can continue to make money and pay their staff. You can also configure ad blockers to allow some non-intrusive advertising to appear – such as ads that don’t block any content or play any sound – or to whitelist websites you want to support. The most powerful ad blockers can remove YouTube video advertising and even scrub sponsored posts from your social media feed. To eradicate these and other forms of digital advertising you need a dedicated blocker. Your web browser is already designed to block the very worst types of malicious advertising – like those spammy pop-up windows that plagued the early internet – but modern advertisers use more sophisticated techniques to get their ads in front of you. This allows your web browser to accept the useful parts of a website and filter out the rest.

In the most basic sense, ad blockers work by checking all of the content that appears in your web browser against a giant list of URLs known to host advertising, then simply not running the code required to display the advertising in your browser window.

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