Blocking advertisements and malware in Opera

Posted on Sunday, February 3, 2008 in Opera

Blocking advertisements and malware in Opera

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Do you remember the web 15 years ago? The advertisements were almost unknown, like spaghetti webs. As the web became more popular and with the dot-com boom it was needed a way to finance so much hype, and then was when massive advertisements arrived.

Nowadays we are in a situation where, except some blogs and personal webpages is hard to find a webpage which doesn't have, at least, some Adsense block, which is not the worse we can find, because then there are pop-ups, ads trying to install malware or that epileptic scams. And cases like Terra, which joins many of the features cited previously (spaghetti web born with dot-com bubble with a high mediatic hype and following crash) with rectangle ads which break its confusing layout. Or other sites with so many advertisements (usually focused on the same topic) that it's hard to find page contents.

All this caused the appearance in browsers of content blockers, like the one Opera includes or those you can add to Firefox with extensions like Adblock Plus. However, Opera doesn't include the option to download and update blocking lists from the Internet, as Adblock Plus does, but you can find contents lists on the Internet.

Since I discovered Opera content blocking I was adding URLs to mi content filter trying to avoid false positives, and now I post it here so you can download it if you are interested. Requires restarting Opera.

Download urlfilter.ini