AdFender can Filter Online Advertisements

Online advertisements although a useful/main source of gaining revenue to bloggers and companies, might have bad consequences to the end users. Some websites feature excessive advertisements, while some other may contain hidden Malicious I-Frame that leads to drive-by-downloads or other malware infections. So, it is always preferable to use some kind of Ad Blockers to filter out bad advertisements.

AdFender from AdFender Inc. is a Free Ad Blocker or Filter. According to the developer:

Internet users the world over are facing an increasing onslaught from advertisers. Pop-ups, pop-unders, banner ads and a range of other online advertisements cause significant deterioration of the average user's experience of the web. As competition intensifies to capture the limited attention span of visitors to web pages, the ads are being made larger, the number of ads per average web page is increasing and other forms of advertisements such as sponsored advertising and off-search paid per click ads are used to bombard visitors to the World Wide Web.
Research shows that pop-ups and other online adverts reduce user intention to return to websites, cause significant delays, consume more computer resources, significantly impact download times and cause distractions to readers. The result? Frustrated users, deteriorating  system performance and diminishing quality of user experience.
AdFender helps you regain control! AdFender ensures that your browsing experience is smooth, efficient and fast. It helps get rid of the annoyances. All this while working in the background causing no interruption to your browsing experience!

The mechanism of AdFender can be found on its read me file.

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. AdFender makes use of the EasyList filter list to determine if a request is for an advertisement or not.

Features & Specifications

• Small installer (1.43 Mb), digitally signed by AdFender, Inc.
• Smooth and fast installation. You can install it for all users or for the current user.
• AdFender works with Windows 7/Windows Vista/Windows XP(SP2 or SP3). Both 32 and 64 bit are supported.
• It installs a tray icon for quick management of the software. When disabled, the tray icon is grayed out.

• The main GUI lists information about Ad Blocking events.

• You can exclude some websites from Ad Blocking.

• AdFender can also be used under proxy.
• AdFender can filter Ads from Browsers, Instant Messengers and P2P. Supported Browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, Avant, K-Meleon, Maxthon and more; supported Instant Messengers are AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger; supported P2P clients are Bearshare, BitComet, iMesh and Pando.
• It can also remove unwanted Internet Explorer Cookies.
• It can keep history of Ad Blocking events and Internet Explorer Browsing.
• It can enable debug log.

My Verdict

AdFender is a pretty decent Ad Blocker. But I have experienced some connection problems while using it behind proxy. Still I prefer it over browser based Ad Blocker which can slow down browsing experience.

Please remember some websites gets revenue online from advertisements. So, if you want to support any such websites that do not have excessive advertisements remember to use AdFender's exclusion list.

Download
Download the software from the following link.
http://download.adfender.com/af15/Setup.exe

MD5: f8afc960efda5245d387403042aa2909
SHA1: a37abe3be889e07309d78f2f8843287ac7b3d187

Cheers !!