Yes, I tend to favor this kind of approach, avoid unnecessary layers of complexity, but in this case what you're trying to do has some drawbacks and IMO the added complexity of a browser extension is justified. Please consider that:

- Blocking outgoing connections, the browser will still try to connect to the ads sites, only to see how the connections fail and probably show you lots of errors. Also, I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing here that the browser might block on those connections before failing. The extension, on the other hand, will prevent those connection attempts from happening at all.

And even if the browser fails silently and doesn't block, well, it will still be nagging me as inefficient every time I load some page :-D

- Those "huge lists" are huge for a reason. If you start blocking individual sites, besides taking ages, by the time you finish you'll probably have your own huge list to micromanage, and it won't be any fun with ads sites changing all the time. I prefer to let others with more time and interest in the topic to take care of that.

Another vote for uBlock Origin.

Good point, I probably ought to look into finding something that displays outgoing connection attempts. Hmm, I guess it would take a bit of work to figure out which outgoing connections are necessary and which aren't. Maybe not too much since I have a very limited number of Internet interests.

Though, I'll probably hold off on that until I can successfully make simple changes to the firewall that actually work.

Hmm... thinking about that I can understand why the web browser extensions are so attractive, it's just I've bitten by that so many times with applications that it eventually becomes complex, or they go EOL, end-of-life.

There are tools, i just am not sure what they are. You start going down the road of computer security, hacking, and network configuration tools for this stuff, which 99% of people don't want to know or care about. The other 5% are programmers/hackers and if the system is working you usually don't want to mess with it much.

For OSX, This is probably what you want, console commands. Basically an active command that will dump to a file or to the terminal what commands it identifies as they are going through. Once you have it? It's a matter of reading the information, which will always have a set format. You'll figure it out quickly if you're just looking for IP's to block.

Keep in mind half of the firewall is blocking incoming connections. If your program is making an outgoing connection, you need to block that too, else it is ignored. probable article of interest

Yes, it's that experience which has guided me to stop browsing the Internet, much the same why I stopped channel surfing television and radio stations, and stopped opening newspapers. Even skimming hasn't seemed worthwhile for me, let alone actual perusal. I mean both the chore and the lack of worthwhile results afterwards.

As such I rarely even follow links anywhere. I already have the few sources that I've determined are reliable for me for right now. Very few. I wouldn't need to make large lists to block, I'd just block everything and only allow that which I already know about, sort of a reverse kill file, a whitelist I think.

Kind of like setting the channels on a television that are desired, and no others. Or unsetting any scanned television channels that aren't desired so the up/down buttons don't traverse through them.

I'd just do something similar with a firewall for the Internet. I guess that might come across as making myself ignorant about what's going on in the world. But I could always temporarily drop those particular firewall settings and explore something new if it seemed to have potential. For the most part I'd simply keep it on until such moments.

That is, if I can ever figure out this "pfctl" firewall thing. After reading lots of manuals it finally seemed rather simple yesterday, but what I did with it just didn't seem to change anything. *sigh*

No big deal if I can't figure out how, I already have a routine, I guess. It just seemed like it had potential. Interestingly, it doesn't seem like the web browser extensions would replace anything I do or add anything for me at all.

Come to think of it, it seems that way to me, too. Nice way of putting it. Probably why that stuff seems so obscure to me.

Thank you, that first link is definitely interesting. OTOH, I had found that second link yesterday and it turned out the final paragraph about "ipfw" being used was wrong. According to other websites that was several versions prior, I think Mac OS 10.5 maybe. After that one and with 10.11 there is instead "pfctl". Because that dated error was on a page of Apple's support website for the current 10.11 version, I kind of figure Apple was simply prettifying their old support pages without updating them, and perhaps I gave up too soon. It'd be nice if manuals and such had a more practical examples instead of being so general. I'm inspired to keep digging again, thank you.

Ok, whitelisting a small set of pages you visit sounds manageable. Now I'm curious about pfctl, so I might try that tomorrow and post my progress, if any.

In the meantime, or maybe forever :), if you want to block some domain there's a very easy way just editing your hosts file: http://www.imore.com/how-edit-your-macs-hosts-file-and-why-you-would-want

"You can also use the Hosts file to block or work around spyware and ad networks by "zeroing out" their IP addresses - putting in 0.0.0.0 then the name of the domain you'd like to block."

OSX is simply FreeBSD built on top with a proprietary GUI. As such you'll find more than enough manuals and tools in the FreeBSD space if you look. That's also in the Unix range of tools so there's likely a lot of crossover, especially with GNU tools which try to have as many of the different features from all branches of similar tools for compatibility.

Here, i'll help you out :)

You can technically do that, but it's not the best tool for the job. For blocking browser requests to known ad domains Hosts file blocking tends to do a better job than firewall level blocking (I use this myself, mainly pulling from list of known ad, tracking, and malware domains). However, while this can block requests to known ad domains, it's ultimately blacklist blocking, which has the problem of ad domains that you haven't specifically blacklisted not being blocked. At the browser level, a tool that accomplishes something similar, but in the form of whitelist blocking, is [url=https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/]Request Policy; this plugin blocks any requests websites make to domains other than the one hosting the site, unless you specifically whitelist the requests. This tends to block ads pretty thoroughly, but also breaks lots of sites until you get the whitelisting for those sites set up properly.

I personally use a combination of Adblock Latitude, Request Policy, Noscript, Ghostery, and Disconnect, which does a damn thorough job of blocking all ads, trackers, and similar, but also requires a fair amount of work and knowledge to still be able to use most sites (mostly knowing what needs to be whitelisted in Request Policy and Noscript), and isn't a setup I'd recommend for most people.

There are way more resources going into making adds more invasive than there are going into add blockers.

Eventually hackers wont need to develop their own code anymore, they can simply cut and paste add code to hack anything.

Eventually adds will be transmitted directly to your brain

Eventually adds will be so sophisticated they will be received by alien races billions of light years away.... because if anything is more likely to defy the laws of physics, it will be adds!

Hmm, I wonder how ads compare to bad news for travel across the universe...

I use the adblock for chrome, Does good but I am looking for something that is easy to install or get that will work better cause I do see some popups and adds still show on some sites that are annoying as fuck...

Wow! Thanks for the abundant responses, people.

I'll be giving Adblocker Ultimate and uBlock Origin a try in the next month or so until I decide which one to keep.

^_^

Personally if Adblock can't handle the site then it's probably too sketchy for me to go to or they're too greedy with ads so I stop going. Along with sites that block contents such as Forbes, I'm not missing anything by not reading Forbes.

I'm quite sure the bad news ships will find plenty of sponsors in the insurance and news media industries!

"we interrupt this bad news bulletin to bring you this amazing insurance offer"

Now that's synergy!

In Australia right now we are getting compensation lawyer adds tacked on to the news helicopter traffic reports. So if your involved in that car accident down there, you know who to call!