Each day, I come across someone on the blogosphere complaining about the design of a Web site. Some don’t like screaming text, others don’t like banners, and still others hate ads. My pet peeves include pop-ups and unwanted JavaScript and cookies. Removing such junk can speed up your Internet connection, since you’re no longer wasting bandwidth downloading data you find useless. Here are some tools you can use to filter the content a Web site renders to you.
Privoxy
Privoxy is a standalone application full of impressive features. It’s a breeze to install. Its default settings are ideal for most users. Fedora and Ubuntu users can respectively install it with the commands yum install privoxy and sudo apt-get install privoxy, or you can grab the source tarball and install it with the commands ./configure, make, make install. Once installed, Privoxy will bind to localhost (127.0.0.1) at port 8118. You can choose a different port and network interface during the manual installation, or specify it under section 4.1 of the /etc/privoxy/config file.