As one of our ex-prime minister would say, advertising should not be hated but loved, because it allows you to provide free services. This applies to TV and, above all, to the web, because if there are so many quality internet sites, advertising must be given credit.
However, it may happen, in some sites, that advertisements disturb the reading and viewing of articles and web pages.
In these cases there are some extensions and tools for Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers that allow you to open these pages without advertising or other disturbing elements, hiding or blocking the most annoying ads, improving the readability of each website .
1) The best extension to disable advertisements and, at the same time, make an online article easier to read is Just Read for Chrome and Reader for Firefox, which prepares a web page for reading, keeping text, images and videos, perfect for reading like a book.
The original web page remains in the background and there is a toolbar at the bottom to enlarge and reduce the text, send the link via e-mail, share on Twitter and Facebook and deactivate the images.
The gear icon takes you to options to adjust the opacity of the background and change the article font, width and margin.
2) Microsoft Edge, the Windows 10 browser, includes a really effective and elegant way of reading the sites, which hides advertisements and any other element, leaving all the space of the page to the article.
To activate this mode, just press, on the Edge address bar, the book button that appears when you open a blog or newspaper article.
3) Firefox also has a reading mode which eliminates any unnecessary elements from websites including advertising.
To do this, simply press the key at the top of the address bar or the F9 key on the keyboard.
4) MagicScroll is an extension for Google Chrome is the ideal tool to read long articles without losing your mark.
Each page opened with MagicScroll is converted as in a book, divided into pages to scroll, without vertical scrolling.
In addition, while reading, you can use the mouse wheel to keep the mark and always know which line has arrived.
At the same time, the page remains ad-free, with only any images (without including videos)
5) If you prefer, there are also bookmarklets to remove advertisements and make a web page easier to read.
The bookmarklets are simply buttons to save (by dragging the link with the mouse) in the favorites bar, to be pressed when you want to use them.
A bookmarklet is Readable, similar to Evernote Clearly from which the extension is derived.
6) Popup blocker
Advertisements are legitimate and not annoying when they are on the sides of a web page or when they do not prevent reading.
The type of advertisement that really irritates is the popup, that is when it appears in front of the page you are visiting and forces the user to see it or look for the button to close it.
In these cases you can block all pop-ups in Chrome and Firefox or, better, a Chrome extension to close pop-ups with a click (because sometimes pop-ups are part of websites and should not be blocked).
NOTE: Some may argue that Adblock has been forgotten on this list.
As I see it, however, Adblock is a web killing extension because if almost all the websites in the world are free, they are thanks to advertising, therefore blocking or hiding it completely is not a good thing.
Finally, note that both Firefox on Android and Safari on iPhone and iPad and Internet Explorer on Windows Phone have the reading mode in the main menu, to view any web page in text and images mode, without advertising.
The mode is for now an experimental feature in Chrome on Android.
READ ALSO: 6 ways to better read websites
