YouTube Auto Buffer is a userscript that fixes a lot of the things that annoy me most about YouTube. It's a beefed up version of the barebones one Lee wrote about last December. Instead of autoplaying a couple seconds of video and having to stop and start because nothing's buffered, this script turns autoplay off and clips fully buffer before playing.

I don't know about you, but I was doing that manually whenever I loaded a YouTube vid anyway. On top of that, it also turns HQ/HD on by default, so you're watching the best available version of each video, and hides the in-video ads that YouTube occasionally shows.

You'll need the Greasemonkey add-on to run YouTube Auto Buffer in Firefox, and the equivalent in other browsers (for Safari, it's GreaseKit). If you don't like all three of Auto Buffer's features, you can turn any of them off in the script's preferences. They're hiding in plain sight underneath YouTube's search box -- not in the Greasemonkey menu as you might expect.

[via Lifehacker]

If you're a Safari user who enjoyed plug-ins -- some people insist on calling them Input Managers, we're agnostic on the subject -- like Glims and PithHelmet in Leopard, and you're sad to see that they don't work in Snow Leopard, you'll be happy to see an update to SIMBL that will let you hack your plug-ins back to life. The new version of SIMBL does indeed work with Snow Leopard, although you'll need to run Safari in 32-bit mode until plug-in developers write 64-bit versions of their plug-ins.

After installing SIMBL, you'll want to drop some plug-ins into your /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins folder. Next, find Safari and put it in 32-bit mode by doing a quick Get Info and checking the box. When you fire up Safari, your plug-ins should be working just as they did in Leopard. It's a bit hacky, but I definitely prefer it to browsing without an ad blocker. If you're wondering where to find plug-ins, you can check out some of my favorites in this post.

What do massacres and bloodbaths have to do with your Gmail account? Lifehacker has discovered that they could be the key to getting rid of the pesky, hard-to-block text ads that show up next to your messages in Gmail's web interface. It turns out that advertisers don't like being associated with certain keywords, falling into categories like profanity and tragic violence. Rather than risk an amusing (at best) or offensive (at worst) ad placement, Google just doesn't display ads next to messages that have a certain density of these keywords.

Lifehacker was able to take advantage of this filtering system to create an email signature that should eliminate the ads. Rather than going the profane route, they whipped up the following innocuous statement: "I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath." If you can live with a violent email signature, you can probably come up with your own variation.

Of all the unlikely places to curate an art show, the ad space on websites has to be one of the most unlikely. Instead of shocking a monkey or being invited to meet some "adult friends," how about looking at a selection of art that changes every two weeks? The Add-Art plugin for Firefox comes packaged with Adblock Plus, but instead of removing the ads entirely, it displays images from the current show.

Replacing ads with art sounded a bit hokey to me at first, but its the curation that makes this idea brilliant. There's something uplifting about a campaign to take a space in a website's layout, that people were just going to throw away with ad-blockers anyway, and repurpose it to show them something new. Looking through the past exhibits, one of the more interesting projects was curated by having Amazon Mechanical Turk workers select their favorites: a clever, populist approach to art, made possible by the web.

[via Andrew Richardson on Twitter]

We've written about Iron before - it's the "privacy enhanced" browser based on Google's Chromium source. While Iron's simple privacy modifications are one reason I use it instead of Chrome, there's now a second one: dead simple ad blocking.

SRWare offers a simple .ini file for download that blacklists tons of known ad hosts. Follow this link to view the file on SRWare's website. Select all the text, copy it, and paste it into Iron's existing adblock.ini file. It's likely stored in C:\Program Files\SRWare Iron\ on your computer.

Visit a site like Yahoo or AOL, and you'll see the file in action - just look for broken image placeholders and error messages. It's a fast, easy way to speed up an already fast browser and save a little bit of bandwidth in the process.

[ via gHacks ]

So you've tested Google Chrome and decided that you like it. You say you'd switch, but there's no adblocker? Fortunately for you, there are several free, tiny filtering proxy applications available that can do the job.

The best part is, they'll help block ads in any browser - including Chrome.

Before I get into a list, it's important to know that several of these apps haven't been updated in ages. However, content filtering is a pretty straightforward operation, so even the old ones work just fine - and you can always tweak the blocking rules yourself.

CyberGuard WebWasher Classic is another great option. It's small, fast, and very customizable. It's got additional capabilities to block popups, scripts, referrers, cookies, and prefixes. New filters are incredibly easy to set up, and there's no noticeable lag in load times. Of the apps I tested, WebWasher was my favorite.

Proxomitron has a god awful GUI, but it works well enough that its appearance can be overlooked (you can create your own bitmaps if you really hate it). It offers extremely flexible bloxing rules, and the default set is extrmely effective. Blocked ads are replaced with [red text in brackets], and pages load times weren't adversely affected.

When you go to set up a new computer, there's always your list of "essential" applications; i.e., applications you simply cannot function without. For some the first install is Firefox and its most-loved extensions. Maybe it's Outlook and your mail account. Hopefully there's an Antivirus application thrown in there somewhere.

When it comes to a Mac, there's one essential plugin that rules them all.

That plugin is Saft, for Safari.

Saft adds an incredible amount of customizable options to Safari: draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, auto-hiding the downloads window, plain copy, tab thumbnails, and so on. It even has ad and image blocking built in (though we've found that Safari 3 AdBlock works better at that function, at least for now).

Saft even covers the little things. For example, if you wanted a new tab in Firefox, you just double-click the tab bar, and voila, a new tab. With Safari, you have to use a keyboard shortcut to get a new tab. (For some people, that is an improvement; but some are clickers, and some are clackers). With Saft installed, no problem. You might call Saft the "Firefoxer" of Safari.

Saft has just been updated for Safari version 3.0.4. It seems that Apple's last security update for Mac OS X Leopard broke Saft temporarily. Thankfully, that issue has been speedily resolved in Saft 10.0.4.

Simply put, Safari without Saft is like Derek Zoolander without Blue Steel. We'll let you figure out the implications of that.

You can download Saft as a trial or register for a reasonable fee of $12.

The world of web browsers is a very unfair place. Internet Explorer isn't the best, yet everyone's using it, and it seems like Firefox gets all the cool add-ons and customizations. The Opera web browser is popular, but primarily with the mobile crowd, and as for Safari, well, it's nice. Safari add-ons aren't exactly the latest craze, but the few that exist are fairly useful.

Introducing: Safari AdBlock, the open source way to avoid internet ads. It's free and (like someone we know on too much rum) easy. To install, simply point your browser to the Safari AdBlock page at SourceForge and hit "Download." The rest is pretty self explanatory. Safari AdBlock should successfully block most ads, although one may get through on occasion. Theoretically, this should decrease a page's load time since you'll no longer have to load ads, but there's a lot that goes into load times so you may not see any increase in performance at all.

Safari AdBlock works with Safari 3 and runs on Leopard (not Tiger and Windows). Those looking for a paid option should check out Pith Helmet, which costs $10 and works with both Tiger and Leopard. If you'd like to further customize your Safari, check out Pimp My Safari.

[via tuaw]

Many of the websites you read on a daily basis (including this one) are supported by advertising. The same is true of television. But just like personal video recorders let you skip through TV commercials, there are browser plugins like Adblock Plus that let you prevent internet ads from displaying on your screen.

As long as most computer users don't make use of these plugins, the internet economy marches on. But just as some television networks are worried that PVRs will kill their entire business model, some web publishers are taking action to fight Adblock Plus.

Web designer and author Jack Lewis has taken the extreme step of preventing Firefox users from viewing his website. If you follow that link using Firefox, you'll be redirected to a "Why Firefox is Blocked" page. If you use Internet Explorer (or the IE Tab plugin for Firefox), you'll see Lewis's blog.

Lewis says he would have blocked Adblock Plus, but since there's no way to do that, he's prevented all Firefox users from reading his site. While this will probably result in a huge boost in short term traffic, we're not convinced it's worth the effort in the long run. We're guessing only a small portion of Firefox users actually use ad blocking software. So he's just shut the door on an enormous potential audience.

Lewis equates your decision to skip over the ads as "stealing" content by viewing the original material without the ads. You know, because when you get up to go to the bathroom during a TV commercial break, you're also stealing.

[via InfoWorld]

Computerworld has a recent article that lists 10 Firefox extensions that they believe users should avoid, with a subtitle stating "Just because an extension is popular doesn't mean it belongs in your Web browser." Unfortunately, the criteria used to determine what should be avoided seems very loose; everything from "so you don't hurt yourself due to your own ignorance", to more self-serving interests like ensuring that readers actually see the ads on Computerworld's website.

Some inarguably essential extensions are on it, making this list pretty difficult to accept. Greasemonkey, for example, is listed as an extension to avoid. The author clarifies that at the very least if you're going to use it, be careful about which user scripts you use. While there's nothing wrong with that sentiment, it's one that goes without saying for any user that is sophisticated enough to be using an extension that exists as a way to actively modify web content locally in your browser.

Similarly, Computerworld lists AdBlock and AdBlock Plus as extensions to avoid, simply because they attempt to block all online advertising. Truthfully, these extensions aren't great for online publishers, but to be fair they do make for a significantly better web browsing experience. This recommendation doesn't appear to be made in the reader's best interests.

While an article that lists extensions that should be avoided seems like a good idea, it should be based on some sort of specific criteria, like extensions that have stability, performance or security flaws. A few recommendations on the list fall into this category, but the list is pretty inconsistent in this regard.

The list of extensions that probably shouldn't have made this list is longer than those that belong on it. If you're a computing neophyte, Computerworld's list might apply to you. For anyone that has consciously chosen to download a 3rd party browser like Firefox, you're probably more than capable of figuring out how to responsibly use these extensions if they have features you'd like to use.

Adblock is an excellent Firefox extension but has its failings. Among my Adblock pet peeves are its lack of a whitelist and general absence of options. Adblock Plus is an extension that tries to succeed where Adblock does not. It (as of version 0.6) is a complete rewrite of Adblock that does everything its successor does but adds whitelisting, preferences to control how it behaves, and a sidebar that will show you all of the objects on a page and let you choose what to block.