Privoxy is a very small proxy that can be run from startup to filter your web traffic. It is simple to set up and basically acts as a go between in front of your browser stopping rubbish getting through.
The kind of filtering it provides is:
- Ad removal
- Web bug removal
- Removes html and JavaScript annoyances
- Popup prevention
- Advanced cookie handling
- Configurable site by site options.
It has virtually no overhead on your PC and can run on “Windows(95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista), GNU/Linux (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Slackware and others), Mac OSX, OS/2, AmigaOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and various other flavours of Unix.” It can be used in conjunction with any browser that can be configured to use proxies (any browser I can think of).
This works well alongside other ad blocking software such as adblock plus for Firefox on my PC although the developers don’t recommend this. It would be ideal as an advertisement blocker for opera or other browsers that don’t have great support for such a function.
The program may actually speed browsing up a little as the browser doesn’t fetch as many requests for unnecessary content.
Although it isn’t a security product as such it will help protect your privacy by not allowing as much user agent info to be sent to the web site you request.
It is proactively developed and has been for a few years now (as long as I have used it). One difficulty though may be the configuring of the program which is done by editing text files. I have never needed to edit a privoxy config file for any reason and go with the default configuration. I have sometimes however (in previous versions) simply disabled privoxy for a website that didn’t function properly. This was a rare occurrence though and overall the program has done far more good than bad whilst saving me a lot of bandwidth.
If you are looking to find parental controls there are better alternates. It does have basic profanity blocking if you wish or you could set up a whitelist of web pages to allow through with this freeware which are nice features.
Another way to block ads and filter which websites are allowed in your browser for free is by editing your host file, something I have covered before.
It’s a simple setup and the online faqs are excellent. Give it a try…
Let me know how you get on with privoxy or if you use something different to filter the web let me know in the comments…
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October 9th, 2009 → 8:45 pm @ Jonny
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