Adverts on the internet can be a serious pain.
The worst throw in of ads are known as malvertising and end up linking to malware.
All of these ads get in the way of you accessing the content you wanted to view.
A common solution people turn to is an ad-blocker.
These community-generated blocklists are never going to be perfect, so occasionally you still run into an ad.
Thankfully, ad-blockers like uBlock Origin allow you to manually block ads that you come across.
Element Picker
There are two relatively simple ways to block adverts with uBlock Origin.
Right-snag the advert you want to block then select Block element… from the right-click menu.
Tip: web connection filters block requests from being made, preventing an ad from being downloaded.
Cosmetic filters hide an element after it loads, this hides the ad, but it will still download.
An overlay will appear in the bottom-right of the page.
Clicking on the suggested cosmetic filters will highlight the section on the page that would be affected.
Each entry in the suggested cosmetic filter list gets progressively less precise.
Once the web connection logger is open, refresh the page you want to block an ad on.
The internet logger shows a list of all requests made by the tab after the logger was opened.
The connection logger uses a colour scheme to indicate which requests have been blocked or allowed.
These columns are the second, third and fifth columns from the left.
Clicking on any of those three highlighted columns will bring up the details view.
To create a new rule, switch to the URL rule tab.
Conversely, blocking everything from the domain can end up blocking too much, especially for first-party resources.
A balance needs to be struck between the two approaches to block enough but not too much.
In the URL rule tab you could decide how precise or vague you want your filter to be.
The grey option in the centre means no-operations, which prevents other rules from acting on that resource.
To block an advert, apply a red filter to the resource or any level of its URL.
Near the top of the URL rule tab are two drop-down boxes, Context and jot down.
you might also apply it to any resource with the asterisk.
Tip: A domain is a website that youre visiting, e.g.
A subdomain is separated by words before the domain and is distinct websites in their own right e.g.
Now you might check that your rule blocked the advert as you wanted it to.
If the advert is still present, you could just undo the rule and hit it one more time.
