Popups are annoying. While there are tons of ad blockers out there, only a few of them actually works. Some popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome comes with built-in popup blocker, but they are not good enough to keep up with the hidden ads and popups that appears when you click on a link or hover over an ad. To help you get rid of ads and popups completely, we have found the best free popup blocker: Adblock Plus. Here, we will show you Adblock Plus’ features, the types of ads you can block with it, things you have to do to block ads completely and more.
Adblock Plus
Platform: Firefox, Chrome, Android, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari
Price: Free
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Features
Block pop-ups, banners and video ads
Supports blocking ads on most of the websites including YouTube and Facebook
Doesn’t collect any personal data from user
Supports blocking known malware domains
Offers option for hiding user tracks from ad companies
Supports removing social media buttons like Facebook like or Tweet
Offers option for allowing unobtrusive ads
Compatible with most of the popular browsers
Description
Installing this free popup blocker is a piece of cake. You can download the plugin from their official website or look for it in your browser’s plugin library. The Firefox version of this free popup blocker doesn’t even require you to restart your browser so it starts working right after installation. As we are used to seeing all those ads, it feels amazing to see how all the page looks without them. There won’t be any popup to annoy you or video ads to keep you from watching your desired videos. You can disable Adblock Plus for a specific page or for a specific site if you want. It’s highly customizable which makes it more easy and user-friendly.
Where it excels
Adblock Plus is more than just a free popup blocker. It can block and hide almost all kinds of ads. Starting from banners and pop-ups to video ads that we see before playing a video, it’s good enough to handle all of them. Moreover, you can hide your online activity tracks and history from ad firms by using Adblock Plus’ tracking protection filters. It can also disable all the social media buttons like Google Plus, Facebook Like and Twitter to make sure those websites don’t get a chance to create a profile about you. Overall, it can work as the ultimate solution for anyone who wants to get rid of ads whether its video ad or pop-ups.
Where it falls short
Adblock Plus managed to handle almost everything thrown at it. However, when I was in a file sharing site, an ad did manage to escape the filter and appeared in a new tab. It happened twice in the same website but that’s the only flaw I noticed when reviewing this app. It’s easy to overlook this flaw as the free popup blocker managed to handle everything else smoothly. The typo protection feature of this ad blocker is not available anymore in the latest version. Users can get it back by installing their URL Fixer extension.
Overall, it’s a great plugin that provides you an ad free web browsing experience. What more can you ask from a free tool?
The Competition
AdwCleaner is not really a popup blocker. It is more of an adware cleaner that protects you from offline ads, toolbars and unwanted programs. It targets software that are installed as a part of bundle along with the program you installed. Some programs require you to install toolbars and unwanted programs and AdwCleaner can detect those software and remove them. The installation process is quite easy and it managed to find some empty folders and registers left by a number of software I removed earlier which was quite impressive. While Adblock Plus gives you protection from all type of online ads, AdwCleaner is good for offline ones.
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uBlock is one of the best Adblock Plus alternatives for Chrome. Just like Adblock Plus, all you have to do is install the plugin and you are done. There are filters and whitelist for blocking and allowing ads and popups for specific websites. We reviewed this plugin using the same websites that we used for testing Adblock Plus. It did manage to block Facebook ads and YouTube video ad but some popups did manage to escape their filter unlike Adblock Plus. It’s not memory hungry like Adblock Plus but it’s only available for Google Chrome at the moment.
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AdFender, another alternative of Adblock Plus, is slightly different from the last two plugins. It’s actually a standalone software that’s compatible with Windows and works with most of the standard browsers including some uncommon ones. It’s user-friendly and customizable just like the previous two plugins but it’s not good at handling everything thrown at it. We saw ads on Facebook and ads appearing in new tabs when clicking on links in file sharing sites unlike Adblock Plus. If you are using an unknown internet browser, you can check out this ad blocker for a less cluttered web surfing experience.
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