Being on the road over the Christmas break i had to use mobile broadband and some low bandwidth internet connections. Using a proxy and good internet connection at home i was frustrated by all the advertisement and blinking pop-ups i faced these days. So I decided to give a little hint to all those people who just thought proxy can only be used for caching and XXX site blocking.
You can use the proxy for content filter as you know, you do not need to use the caching or access control features when using the proxy, the only thing you need to activate is the content filter formally called “URL Filter”. Check “Block 'ads’ with empty window” on the content filter site and activate the proxy. Use an auto updated blacklist from shalla e.g..
After setting your favorite internet browser to use the proxy (or use the transparent mode) you can check some websites with and without proxy.
www.youtube.com – big ad gone away
www.amazon.com – small side ad gone away
www.ebay.com – small side ad gone away
I even noticed that if you sometimes want to watch a video online a short ad clip is started, even those are mostly gone.
Some more information for the proxy configuration can be found using our wiki site http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/configuration/network/proxy
I know that there are browser extensions and dns filtering options that might give you the same result, but i just wanted to share this with you because it´s very easy to set up.