PithHelmet: Internet Minus the Advertising

Ads. They’re flashy, obtrusive, and probably the most despised thing in the world (or at least in the top 10.) And yet, ads are everywhere: in print, on television, on the radio, and most of all on the internet. Some internet ads are downright heinous: they hover over page content, play obnoxious sound effects, or ask you to do something ridiculous in return for offers that are obviously too good to be true. So how can you effectively avoid ads while surfing?

Well if you’re watching television or listening to the radio, you can just change the channel. For many, internet ads seem to be an inevitable downside to web browsing. If you’re sick of being bombarded with messages about how you’re the 999,999th visitor, or urgently need to re-mortgage your house, then it sounds like you need PithHelmet.

PithHelmet, by Mike Solomon, is a brilliant little plugin for Safari that, straight out of the box, eliminates practically any kind of ad you can imagine. It works like magic: without the tiniest bit of configuration, PithHelmet rids webpages of everything from tiny text ads to sprawling Flash banners. It can even pause animated GIFs and eliminate MIDI background music.

The force powering this is PithHelmet’s rule editor, as the program comes loaded with dozens of rules defining what content it should and shouldn’t block. Occasionally it gets overeager and blocks something it isn’t supposed to - like an embedded image or Flash file - but this problem can be easily solved with an optional contextual menu item that disables ad-blocking on the site you’re on.

Advanced users can also make their own custom rules in the Perl-based rule editor. PithHelmet additionally allows you to create preferences for individual sites, letting you define such parameters as whether Javascript is enabled and how cookies are accepted. PithHelmet can even add a small menu to the right of the Help menu in Safari, giving you easy access to all the ad-blocking tools you could need.

In my experience with PithHelmet, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do about 95% of the time. Occasionally it blocks page content that it isn’t supposed to, and on very rare occasions it damages the layout of a page, but the vast majority of the time it provides an easy, ad-free browsing experience. Because it has both out-of-the-box functionality for newcomers, and a slew of features to please advanced users, PithHelmet is the perfect app for anybody who is sick of online ads.

PithHelmet is shareware, but at an extremely reasonable $10, you have no excuse not to pick up a copy. Oh, and by the way, congratulations: you’re this site’s one millionth visitor and you just won your very own private island. You saw that coming, didn’t you?