There it is! Your favorite page on the Internet appear, ready for you to digest some important fact or trivial tidbit. And, lo: What’s this? An ad. It shuffles in from the left, or fades in over the entire page. Your day is ruined.

That was once how the web appeared to me. I’d visit a page, say the Internet Movie Database, and suddenly an annoying full-page Shockwave peel would appear. I’d have to wait for it to go away, or I’d be quick and find the secret, hidden Close button.

Worse are those video ads that automatically start playing. For example, I’ll open a host of links in a series of tabs. In one of the tabs, a video or audio bit starts playing. Before Google added the Audio Playing icon to the tabs, I’d just quit Chrome (my browser) and be done with it.

How much more annoying can an automatically playing ad be?

Well, I don’t know any more. That’s because I finally installed the Adblock Plus browser extension. Now I live in peaceful bliss, no longer annoying by advertising on Facebook, YouTube, or even Wambooli!

To install Adblock Plus, you need Chrome or Firefox or some other legitimate browser that allows for extensions. Then visit their page on the web:

https://adblockplus.org/

Follow the directions to install the extension. It’s cinchy.

Once installed, Adblock Plus starts working and the online advertising stops appearing.

In fact, it vanished entirely from Wambooli (and my C For Dummies programming site). That’s because I use Google AdSense here to help fund the site, plus I offer my books for sale on Amazon.

The problem of missing ads was fixed by adding wambooli.com and c-for-dummies.com to my personal list of OK web sites — also known as a white list. Ads appear on those sites, which is fine by me.

It’s been a few weeks now, I don’t miss the ads. Unfortunately, I’ve been here before: I remember installing an ad-blocker back in the early days of the Web, back when the advertising was often proportionally more grotesque than today. Eventually the web browser developers figured out how to bypass the ad-blocker. That episode may repeat, so enjoy Adblock Plus while you can.