There seems to be a new trend going around on the greedier of websites out there to block Firefox users based on the fact that many of them could be running AdBlock and cutting down the revenue stream of said websites’ masters. Ignoring the rather obvious matter that someone using AdBlock would not, were they forced or unable to use it, click said ads, it seems more of a ploy to grab clicks through deceit or, quite possibly, prevent users of decent browsers see how crappy some people have coded their websites - so as to work only in IE, preferably with the most arcane of browser extensions available.

Well, if you think enough is enough, here’s a couple of quick tips on how to go around some of these blocks while still maintaining an ad-free browsing experience¹.

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1. Note that I am not going to engage in any kind of debate on whether blocking ads does, really, impact negatively those websites that depend on them [↩]

Beyond the superior rendering capabilities and improved security that Firefox provides, another reason I love using it lies in the power that Extensions provide to the user. Since historically speaking, Firefox was meant as a lightweight browser, it allows extensibility through various add-ons that the user may find useful. Here’s my power-user, supercharged version of FF¹.

As you may be able to tell, I’ve tried to dedicate as much space as possible to viewing websites and less to the things I don’t use [like navigation buttons.] Here’s what I have [click the pic above for the full-size rendition] and how I browse:

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1. Bon Echo used to be the codename for Firefox 2. Since the main Mozilla team has been slow to use Mac OS X’s native buttons and look and feel, somebody very nice made a minor ‘port’ of sorts - but due to obvious copyright issues the name and logo were changed. Regardless, whatever you do in Bon Echo is automatically synchronized with vanilla Firefox - this means history, bookmarks, plugins etc [↩]