The Adblock Project

[Schwern]

Hi, I use adblock and have a small feature request.

My primary use for adblock is to get rid of flashy, distracting ads. This falls into two categories: flash and animated GIFs. Otherwise if its just an image I can live with it and want to download it to support the site.

I often set broad ad blocking rules like http://ad.* or */ads/*. This wacks out everything. Flash, animated and static images. It would be nice if there was an option on each rule to block *only* animated ads (flash or animated GIFs). Flash seems relatively easy as that can be seen by its HTML context. Animated GIFs would seem to require downloading some or all of the file. Hopefuly it would just be the first N bytes to look at the header.

Alternatively, there could be a per rule "do not loop" option. So it loads and goes through its spiel once and that's it.

[kstahl]

You can disable animated GIFs in Firefox itself. Go to about:config and set image.animation_mode to once or none.

As for blocking animated Flash.. I thought all Flash was animated? You can easiliy construct a rule to block all (most?) Flash content.

[Schwern]

[Drahken]

There is no way for a program to tell if an animated image is one you want or not. It can watch for certain keywords in the url (such as "/ads/"), and it can check the filetype (mainly based on the extension), and it can prevent all animated images from animating, but how do you expect it to know that you want to see the dog wagging it's tail but don't want to see the cat licking itself??
The closest you could come to doing that would be to block "/ads/*gif" and "/ads/*swf" instead of just "/ads/". (Using the * wildcard will block site.com/ads/ad.gif and site.com/ads/ad.swf, but won't block site.com/ads/ad.jpg. This, in theory, will block all animated ads, but only animated ones. Of course, it's effectiveness all depends on how considerate the sites are when it comes to naming their ads.)

[Schwern]