Saturday, October 01, 2005

Camino Rocks

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For a while now my favorite browser's been Camino, which is a side project from Mozilla.org. Like Safari and Firefox, it's a free browser that works on Mac OS X. However, it's faster than Safari and integrates with OS X's GUI better than Firefox.




But now I've discovered a new feature: The Ad Blocker.





No, I'm not talking about the Pop-Up Blocker - that's something already in every browser worth taking up space on your hard drive (read: NOT Microsoft Explorer). Instead, the Ad Blocker goes after banner ads that have been imbedded into a web site.





As soon as I turned it on I started going to as many of my bookmarks as I could think of that had banner ads on them, and it worked pretty well. Google Ads, Double Click, and even some ads that I thought were hand coded into the web pages all succumbed to the might that is Camino. A few things slipped through on my Yahoo! Mail page, but I hardly go there anyway.





So why post this here? There are some people who vehemently oppose any kind of advertising in school. (I myself am neutral about ads in school, since that's another way we can teach students about weighing information based on it's source, but I see the point of keeping ads out of school as well.) A browser that blocks more kinds of ads than others can free up even more web sites for school access.





That, and if I see another "Punch the monkey to win a free X-Box" animated ad I think I'm going to scream.

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