I use AdBlock all the time, and its great. I can view any site I want without being distracted by bad breath.

AdBlock and the like have one fault, they try to block advertisements, by removing them from the page. On 90% of the sites, when AdBlock is on, the site is built around these ads, "knowing" that they are being removed, and will either get stuck, showing nothing and needing a page refresh (after which it WILL load) or it will show most of the page, but miss some important parts, won't respond to clicks, and continuously show the downloading icon, and write "downloading progress" in the status bar.

AdCover works without "changing" the downloaded page. The page is downloaded to its entirity. It "Covers" the selected sections in a transparent way, so that the offending ads are not seen.

Warning: Almost technical speak ahead
AdCover as opposed to this will show the whole page, but while rendering the sites you wish to dismiss, will cover them with an extra [div] of the background color or image as if there was no image/media rendered in that location. So the web DOM continues to read the same as before, but the offending parts are covered. Better yet, since this is a browser add-on we could have the offending section covered OUTSIDE the web DOM, so that interaction (mouse changing pointers, tooltips etc) may be optionally enabled, so that the rest of the site "feels" everything was downloaded as usual.
-- pashute, May 21 2009

Hey, I thought of a half-recipe to bake this! Download the movie to a media filter, which passes it on to the target player (media real etc) but if marked for filtering, play the same size and lenth with an image from the background if no media was to be played, and discard the original stream.

Same with image: Download it to mediaFilter. if the image is to be shown, use the browser's image display to display it, otherwise replace it with a white area.

Its half recipe because the downloading of images etc. is rarely the problem. Its the problem of downloading (or not) of html elements and javascript elements. For that we are back to square 1. You would need the browser to continue rendering as usual, but somehow cover these sections from the user.
-- pashute, May 21 2009


My father has something quite like this: you do not see most ads, but if you click on the blank spaces, they are shwon, without previously loading them - that is, they are loaded with the rest of the page, they are simply not shown until you express some interest in them
-- loonquawl, May 22 2009



random, halfbakery