I guess many of you must have heard or probably already using Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is a very popular advertisement blocker plugin which works only on Firefox and Chrome. The reason why it is only available to Firefox and Chrome is because they are a plugin, and not a universal ads blocker like Ad Muncher where it can support all web browsers. I guess everyone could have gone with Ad Muncher if is it a freeware but unfortunately it is a shareware that can get pretty expensive if you go for the Premium Unlimited Updates, costing a total of $109.95. Come on, an ad blocker that cost more than a hundred bucks? Definitely not everyone can afford that…
Don’t be despair because I have a good news. Recently I got to know about AdFender, a free ads blocker from leofelix. AdFender shares a similarity with Ad Muncher which is it doesn’t require any installation of plugins to web browser, hence it works on most major web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Avant, K-Meleon, Maxthon, Lunascape, Epic and more.
AdFender works right out of the box after installation without any requiring any configuration. It sits silently in the notification area (systray) and uses its state-of-the-art ad blocking technology to scan for advertisements. You can double click on the AdFender icon to bring up the user interface which shows the statistics of ads being blocked and also simple configuration such as whitelisting, removing unwanted Internet Explorer cookies, history viewer, filtered applications, logs and update checker.
Other than blocking advertisements in web browsers, it can also block ads in instant messengers such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. P2P applications such as Bearshare, BitComet, iMesh and Pando are supported as well. You can try logging in to your Windows Live Messenger and you will notice that the advertisement at the bottom of the program shows an empty blank box instead of advertisement.
If you wonder how AdFender work, the below quote below taken from the AdFender official website explains it quite well.
AdFender is a local content-filtering HTTP proxy server. Typically, your web browser contacts web servers directly to retrieve specific web pages that you request. Sometimes, however, web browsers are configured to use an intermediary called a proxy server. A proxy server is a program that accepts requests from a web browser to retrieve a specific web page and then contacts the web server containing that web page. The proxy then passes all the data from the web server to the web browser. AdFender uses the name of the web page (URL) that a browser would request as the base of it’s operational decisions. If AdFender determines that the request is for an advertisement, the request is blocked, otherwise it passes all data from the web server back to the web browser.
The show_ads.js file which belongs to Google Adsense is served by AdFender. The file is normally 5.2KB in size but has become only 123B.
Since AdFender runs as an independent program, it is important to make sure that it doesn’t hog on the CPU and memory usage. On Windows startup, AdFender takes up only 4MB of memory usage and it goes up over 10MB with a few web browsers simultaneously loading a website with advertisements. The memory usage then starts to drops back to less than 10MB. As for the CPU usage, AdFender takes very up merely 1-5% when a website is being loaded in web browsers.
AdFender is light, free, easy to use and works in most major web browsers on Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP(SP2 or SP3). Definitely a great alternative to Ad Muncher if you are looking for something that is free. I would even prefer AdFender over plugin based adblockers because I do not like my web browser to be too crowded with plugins.
Adfender 1.50 causes higher CPU usage for Wmprvse.exe Windows 7 process.
i love this program.
however because of you guys, i installed privoxy. it’s okay.
but how will i know if it’s working and blocking ads?
how can i update the database for ads detection?
awesome program! i love it! privoxy thing, how can i be sure it blocks ads and updates the database?
Privoxy is much worthy than others. Ad Muncher increases Java Load Time, and reduces the performance of IE9, but similar to Adblock for Chrome and better than AdFender. Meantime, Privoxy is free, fast, flexible, reliable, secure and for end-to-end users.
Though, AdFender is similar to IE9 Tracking Protection at free of cost, I prefer IE9 Tracking Protection with Privoxy or with any adblocker.
gotta go to Privoxy or something similar instead.
no ad problems for me as i use kaspersky internet security with antibanner enabled….it blocks most of the ads with its heuristic detection capablity….
But after installed KIS 2012, “Windows was not properly shut down” error is being reported under “Computer’s Reliability And Problem History” on Windows 7 Ultimate SP1. For such glitch I wrote to Kaspersky but they are helpless.
I’m grateful for letting us know about AdFender. Unfortunately, I had lost an offer to get 1 Year Basic License on Christmas from AdMuncher.
AdFender might be an alternative of AdMuncher, but working pretty well with IE9 Tracking Protection. Thanks.
I.ve been using Adblock plus with google chrome and it stopped blocking ads, and googled to find out why and found out that policy has changed as found out through this link
pcworld.com/article/246099/adblock_plus_defends_decision_to_allow_some_ads.html
I couldn’t find settings to turn off ”Allow non-intrusive advertising” so i changed my extension to Adblock and now everthing is working fine again.
Johny1g
very informative article.thanks Raymond.
pls. have a comparison between adblock and adfender
.which one blocks ads more precisely?
.which one takes less memory?
Privoxy does an equally good job on this..
This Admuncher-Alternative is a excelent Tip for me, because Admuncher is to expensive last years. Thank you Raymond!
Excellent software. wanted such software very badly. Whenever i open raymond.cc screensaver ad pops up automatically, was always thinking on how to disbale such ads. Very useful and very well working on other sites as well.
my biggest complaint is that it doesnt block any ads when you run your browser inside of sandboxie.
From a forum:
When running browser sandboxed you need do this in SandboxIE (to AdFender to filter): Open Sandbox Settings -> Resource Access -> IPC Access -> Full Access, click Add, enter into the Add Resource Name box: *BaseNamedObjects*adfenderactive_*
very interesting article… I will check out that application… thanks for sharing…
It is an excellent programme, windows built in firewall asking for exceptions, allowed it is auto updating saving few bandwidth but it is making web page load faster,it is stopping ads wihin an hour a whopping 850
Is there a software, preferably freeware that I can use to track a Laptop in case it’s stolen?
Use Prey : preyproject.com/
I have an Ad Muncher license and uninstalled it. It EXTREMELY aggressive in not allowing content. It disables ads but also real content as rotating news and pictures on two portals I use to connect. Even when both portals are allowed still a lot of content is missing. Even when uninstalled some of its service was still working. Had to reboot. Even considered the best, for me it was not good.
Ad Muncher shouldn’t remove anything but ads.
If you see damage you need to tell the devs and they will fix it within 24 hours.
I did this a few times and now none of the sites I visit have any problems at all.
Ad Muncher is far more powerful than this new ad blocker.
I already tried it but i removed it, because when adfender filter is enabled and test my ping in speedtest.net i had a very high ping i can’t play online games with high ping.. i hope ray you can help me to circumvent the high ping while adfender is blocking ads.
Verified. I couldn’t even run a pingtest with AdFender enabled as it kept on reporting that it couldn’t connect to the test server. Disabling AdFender and the problem goes away.
Okay. This is really weird. This software seems to interfere with my bitorrent downloading activities. The download speeds were reduced to 1 – 6 kBps as soon as I installed this thing.
Initially, I thought something maybe wrong with the torrent. Only later I realized the slow speeds after installing AdFender. Ended up uninstalling it and now the torrent speeds are back to 256 kBps.
This may be an isolated issue. :)
That is an interesting discovery but unfortunately I couldn’t test it myself since my ISP already throttles torrent downloads.
I can confirm that here the torrent download speeds haven’t gone down. It might have been down just 1 or 2 KBPS but not as low as “candid.trader” had experienced.
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Installed Adfender yesterday. I had disabled Adblock plus to see how it fared. According to what I see here, it did not do a better job. I could still see advertisements, a lot of them. I hope that this will do a better job as time progresses.
Ping test result with Adfender enabled pingtest.net/result/54351392.png
With Adfender Disabled
pingtest.net/result/54351418.png
open the main console of the Ad finder ,there is three options in applications menu first is browser second is instant messenger and third is P2P ,you deselect the P2P menu i think after that there is no problem in using bitorrent with Ad finder
Thanks for the suggestion.
No Alternate for mac????
you should try bfilter (bfilter.sourceforge.net/download.php) does pretty much the same thing.
f you wonder how AdFender work, the below quote below taken from the AdFender official website explains it quite well
two “below”
Thanks for the info. :)
It make Google Chrome Crash… can’t use it :(
Google Chrome is working with this freeware in my computer
ive tried it on IE9, doesnt work well
May I know how AdFender “doesn’t work well” on IE9? I would like to test it further.
From AdFender support…
If you are running Windows Vista or higher, check if your browser is running with elevated privileges. If your browser is running with elevated privileges, you can right click the AdFender tray icon, and select the option “Run with elevated privileges” to run AdFender with elevated privileges. If you don’t see this option in the tray menu and you are running Windows Vista and higher, it means AdFender is running with elevated privileges. Verify your firewall settings to make sure AdFender is allowed to connect to the Internet. It is also possible that you are seeing ads that have been downloaded previously and is present in your browser cache. Refer to your browser help on how to clear the cache.
It is not work for me also on IE9 and on Firefox Nightly build, but works on Chrome, Chrome Canary, Opera, Maxthon and Firefox stable build.
Just tested on IE9 on Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit with latest updates, no problem. Any chance you’re on 64-bit?