minimizing car ads, pop up, trackers, etc.

[vhelp]

i want to start looking for a new car and want to review various car listings--google, etc.

will be replacing a 97' neon. i've had my heart set on the Cobalt GT or lowest package. color, prefer green or else, maybe purple-blue or close.

what can i do to minimize the "effects" from visiting all the websites that i go on ?

i don't want to have car ads popping up later, like when i visit this forum board, they pop up.

site redirectors, locators, java, cookies, you name it. after visiting those websites, i always get bombarded by all kinds of sneaker tracker ads and sniffers and all sorts of other sneaky nonsense.

i just want to go to websites, look at the car and specs and move on, not worry about all the nonsense later just because i visited those websites.

what do you guys recommend for me to prepare for these websites ?

thank you.

[TreeTops]

I use 'NoScript' addon for Firefox. Takes a little learning curve to use but works. Most video scripts are blocked but you can easily unblock for the site you want to watch.

[redwudz]

I use DuckDuckGo for a search engine. They don't track. https://duckduckgo.com

You can also install a hosts file if you just want to block many of the obnoxious ads. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
You may have to 'tune' it a bit as it may block too much. But you can edit it if needed.

[vhelp]

well, firefox is out of the question. around the time the forum changed its face, my firefox was infected by some bot or something that i can't/couldn't remove, so i went back to opera and the problem went away. it seems that ff is too volnerable these days, and i'm just not anti-virus savy enough to spend time with it.

the other annoying thing about going to car websites is that they take a long time to load. the pages are designed to load flash and other motion icons and whatnot first. those mini or micro vidoes take too long on my puny DSL. and even at work, they have throttled the speed, so the pages don't load as fast as they should. thats corporates for you. or maybe for some.

oh, and also, i noticed that websites are now requiring you to "manually" close a pop-up before the rest of the page(s) finish loading or un-obscured from view. i suspect they are applying some worse-than cookie tracker or something on the machine/person visiting them. sheesh. what leaches.

[redwudz]

I got tired of waiting a minute or two for some pages to load and I have a fast connection. They were loading lots of ads and videos. The host file fixed that, but sometimes blocks videos you may want. But a bit of tuning helps.

Trying a different search engine may be the easiest fix. Some search engines like Google sell your searches to anyone and you end up with a lot of spam ads.

If you view news from the net, you might try MyWay news. It has no video, photos or ads and loads in tenths of a second. http://news.myway.com/index/id/national%7Cap.html

[vhelp]

I got tired of waiting a minute or two for some pages to load and I have a fast connection. They were loading lots of ads and videos. The host file fixed that, but sometimes blocks videos you may want. But a bit of tuning helps.

if you have IE, the sounds are like machine guns going off...everything is loading, all the tics and trackers and whatnot. but i wouldn't install that poison.

If you view news from the net, you might try MyWay news. It has no video, photos or ads and loads in tenths of a second. http://news.myway.com/index/id/national%7Cap.html

thanks for that..and i will keep that link. yeah, you are correct. it loaded faster than i could blink. i was still blinking when it finished. that's how the internet used to be in the good old days.

thanks for the rest of the tips...will look into those.