Another method of escaping these pervasive and aggravating ads, alas only available to users of the Mac OS X operating system, is to use the beautiful browser OmniWeb, which includes two very useful features in the preferences:
- To prevent popup ads: Under the JavaScript preferences pane, there is a "scripts are only allowed to open new windows:" item, with "always", "never", and (my choice), "only in response to a link being clicked". I have never encountered an unwanted popup ad while browsing with OmniWeb using this setting.
- To prevent banner ads: The ever-useful Privacy preferences pane, which allows you (a) to not load anything from sites matching certain expressions (defaults include "/ads\..*\.net/", "/ads\..*\.com/", and "/.*\.doubleclick\.net/"), and (b) has options to not automatically load images "whose sizes match the standard sizes for ads", or "that aren't from the site which loads them".
I have been quite impressed by these features, and hope to see them showing up in open-source or other noncommercial web browsers across many different platforms. It only makes sense.