As reported on LifeHacker.
by Adam Dachis
The internet is full of knowledge, but also full of annoyances. Nevertheless, with some clever tricks and helpful tools you can eliminate most of the bad stuff and retain the good. Get your internet experience in top form this weekend.
Block or Ignore Ads
While you can’t always block ads with one of our favorite browser extensions AdBlock Pluswithout causing issues on certain sites, you can find a number of ways to ignore them with less-aggressive tools. No Hulu Adssimply mutes Hulu ads. (Hush does the same thing, but just on OS X.) Flashblock forFirefox and Chrome keeps Flash out entirely, and that’s the source of the most annoying ads. If you want to see any blocked Flash content, however, you can just click through and you’re good to go. As a bonus, this will help save battery life when browsing on your laptop. Often times a combination of these tools will work best, as blocking video ads, and even some flash content, causes issues with certain web sites. If you make AdBlock less aggressive and use these other tools to fill in the blanks, you’ll have a better ad-free browsing experience.
View Region-Restricted Content
Some sites—especially ones that stream video—block you from accessing their content unless you’re in a particular country. For example, Hulu doesn’t really work outside of the United States and BBC’s iPlayer requires you to be in the UK (essentially). Hola Unblocker solves this problem for most of the common sites like those previously mentioned plus Netflix, Pandora, and the ITV Player. While some sites work outside of their countries of origin, content rights vary and unblocking can open up more options. To open up virtually any other site based in the US or UK, try TunnelBear. It’s basically a free VPN (with a data limit) for OS X and Windows that’ll help you access blocked content by making it seem like you’re in another country. Sites will load slower, of course, but it’ll work on practically anything.
Make Specific Websites Suck Less
There are many ways to fix problems with specific sites. Social Fixer makes Facebook infinitely better and requires very little configuration. A few browser extensions can significantly improve YouTube so you don’t need to suffer annoying comments or constant pop-up notes on videos. Gmelius soups up Gmail so you don’t have to look at ads and can add missing features. Overall, Userscripts and Userstyles can make any annoying web site feature go away or just look nicer. With a little know-how, you can customize most sites to your exact preferences. Gmail, in particular, has some really great options.