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The idea is that legitimate ads (directly from the website you're currently surfing) will get through, but any "third-party" ads (which not from the website you're surfing, and hence more likely to be tracking you) are blocked. Besides protecting you from cross-website tracking – and potentially from downloading/displaying ads from malware vendors – blocking ads often speeds up the loading of webpages.
Some things to keep in mind:
- It is definitely possible that ad-blockers will corrupt a website's appearance appearance. The whole point is to stop third-party ads from being displayed – this may lead to visual difference in the webpage compared to what it would have displayed with the ads (or with the ad-blocker turned off).
- It is also possible that ad-blockers will corrupt a website's functionality! This is somewhat rare, but as ad-blockers have gotten better, so have the advertisers – in some cases, they will embed javascript code inside the page to verify that an ad was placed before allowing you to view some content or take some actions ... which leads is related to ...
- You may see pop-ups, banner images, or text on an otherwise-blocked website asking you to please whitelist them (they noticed your ad-blocker and are asking you to explicitly show the ads). By blocking ads, you are interfering with the website's ability to collect ad revenue and hence their ability to show content for free.
- With uBlock installed, you must take an action to re-enable this flow of ad-revenue to sites you approve of. This is the usual way to use uBlock and they make it quite easy to do.
To Whitelist a Website:
- In Chrome and Firefox, you'll see a red or gray shield icon containing a stylized 'u' and 'b'. Click that icon to show the main uBlock panel:
- Click the blue power button image (circle with a line at the top) and uBlock will permanently whitelist the website.
- A grey power-button image means that uBlock is disabled for this website (either it is already whitelisted or the site has no third-party ads or trackers).
- Click the browser's Reload button (next to the URL text area) to reload the page with uBlock disabled.
To Disable uBlock Entirely:
While DUL IT staff strong suggest using uBlock or a similar ad-blocker while you surf the 'net, if you wish to disable it, follow these instructions:
- For Chrome:
- Open a new window or new tab and enter the URL "chrome://extensions/" (if you're not familiar with it, Chrome provides a URL-like interface to many of it's internal settings)
- Find uBlock Origin in the card-list and de-select it by clicking the blue slider-button.
- Open a new window or new tab and enter the URL "chrome://extensions/" (if you're not familiar with it, Chrome provides a URL-like interface to many of it's internal settings)
- For Firefox: