Many Internet users are annoyed by the frequent popup ads that are so common on web pages these days. These ads jump off the screen and can be extremely distracting. Many modern web browsers deal with this nuisance by simply offering an option to block these popups. Here is an incomplete list of browsers that offer this capability:

Conspicuously absent from this list is Internet Explorer. While we think Firefox is a better browser than IE we acknowledge that it is the industry standard. We urge you to try Firefox or one of the others on the above list but if you still need to use IE we do have solutions for you as well.

To block popups in IE you can use one of the many shareware or commercial products available. Some of these may be found in our Internet Software database. OWT also has a specially configured proxy server that will block most popup ads as well as most banner ads. We use the Privoxy software to accomplish this. This software is not perfect but many users love it. Give it a try!

Configuring Your Web Browser To Use Our Ad Blocking Proxy Server (Privoxy)

To use our ad blocking proxy server you must configure your system to use a proxy server. We have a support section on this that relates to our traditional cache server. The instructions found there are almost the same as when using our ad blocking proxy. The only difference is that our traditional cache server uses Port 3128 whereas our ad blocking proxy server uses Port 8118. See our configuration document for more information and assistance with your specific browser - remember to substitute port 8118 for 3128 in your configuration.

Our cache server supports: http, https and ftp protocols but http the ad blocker only works with http. So you should configure your http proxy to port 8118 and either leave your ftp proxy blank or use port 3128 for that.

There are a few sites - usually requiring more than average security that will not coexist with caching technologies well. For this reason we don't cache by default. However, it is quite simple to configure your browser to ignore the cache server for certain URLs or disable the technology altogether on demand.