Blocking Scripts, Advertisments and setting Cookies for an Awesome Browsing experience

This article is about blocking Scripts, Advertisments and certain Cookies to make your browsing experience that much better. But before you do, I think I should show you both sides of the argument:

It is about enhancing the web in speed, and making it better for the general population that uses it. Plus making it less of an absolute nightmare for Heads of IT, as it freely reduces internet usage, reduces any chance of pop under malware , and makes less tech-savvy users far less exploitable if Windows is still a requirement.

It is about increasing your privacy on the web.

It is NOT about the Illuminati.

Now that that's over with, let's begin.

Blocking

Blocking is a very general term - something that blocks entry or another part of itself. And as you can read all about here (under "fat ads") and here (the entire point of that article) I will not explain much of its usefulness here. Instead I will simply explain their usage.

So, let's get started!

Installing Adblock

This is probably the simplest one. It consists of a very small set of links.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation - The optimal choice per browser:
- Chrome
- Opera
- Firefox
Now to install the blocking scripts:
- Save the file ublock_export.txt to your documents or another easily accessible location.
- Click on the uBlock icon.
- Open the options page for it by clicking on the text that says "uBlock Origin (version)", for instance "uBlock Origin 1.5.6".
- In the options page, find "Restore from file..."
- Select ublock_export.txt and open.
- Wait for it to load and download (this will take a long time - overall the used space is just shy of 36 megabytes as of 16/Jan/2016)
- Ensure that all the filters are up to date (It WILL take a fairly large amount of time, but don't change tabs at the moment!)
- Customise to your liking. If you don't want to block YouTube suggestions for instance, but just block the cancer called YouTube comments, then go down to the bottom of the page and disable the Youtube: Remove Youtube Suggestions filter. If you don't want to block YouTube comments, disable YouTube: Remove Comments filter.

Installing Script Blockers

This one is easy.

There are two main script blockers you can install:

Both of them perform their function perfectly.

I'm not going to give you much to go on, but anyway, if you copy the content of script_export.txt to the Import section of ScriptSafe and click import, it will work.

This one is even easier than the last. Plus it's only needed for one single site.

There's only a few. And the best part is that they're all on Forbes.com!

In Chrome or Opera, you can open forbes_cookies.json and copy everything in it.
Go to forbes.com, and paste it in. Now close the tab, open the link again and Huzzah! You've prevented Forbes from giving you that horrible Welcome screen, plus you've prevented them giving you a "Please disable your ad blocker" page (or rather, the Page of Ads).

If you've already installed uBlock and/or the Script Blocker, then you may need to copy and paste the URL as it will otherwise identify as being a popup. Even if you right-click and Open in new Tab it will still think of it as an ad as it opens.