How to get rid of Annoying Adverts in Android Chrome

I've tended to accept adverts as the price I have to pay for getting free access to websites, but in the last few months adverts have become so intrusive and annoying as to make some sites almost unusable, particularly on a mobile device. Here are some tactics you might be familiar with:

• You arrive at a site and start reading something, then it jumps down to make way for an advert that's just appeared above it. You scroll down to find the bit you were reading, and it jumps again as another ad arrives. And then again.
• While scrolling through an article, a video ad pops out of nowhere. And it's the same video you've been seeing all week.
• The site freezes while some stupid ad downloads or something. The effect is the same whatever: you can't finish what you were reading.
• While you're reading, a voice starts talking from a video that's decided to auto-play. On the York Press site you sometimes get two copies of the same video.
• You're distracted by the animated ad that's playing just to the side of the bit you actually want to read.

Now I realise that the people who place ads are desperate to get you to pay attention to them, but I've pretty well given up on visiting some sites because of the appalling quality of their user experience. I'm trying not to mention The Verge or the Independent.

Today I decided to try a drastic remedy, but it seems to have done the trick: I turned off JavaScript and stopped the little sods in their track.

(This is for Android Chrome 45 on Android 5.1, but other web browsers will have a similar setting somewhere in their options.) Go into Chrome's main menu and pick Settings. Under Site Settings click on JavaScript. Switch it off. It's that simple.

On the downside, any web page that wants you to input text (I don't know, Amazon, say) won't work, but if you just want to read, this will completely block the really irritating ads. Simple ones that don't want to jump around will still be there, and you can pay as much attention to them as you always do. None, in my case. If you do need to use a web page that needs JavaScript to function, you can always just switch it back on while you're there.

Or, here's an idea: install a second web browser app and have one Javascript-enabled, and one not.

Fixing Chrome for Android

An interesting tip I feel the need to pass on.

On my Android (version 4.2) phone I typically use Dolphin as my browser. I have Chrome as well of course, but I gave up with it early on as it seemed to be fundamentally broken. For instance, it just refused to open up the bookmarks tab.

Last week I found out why. I had deliberately disabled JavaScript as a security measure. (I don't do much data entry on a phone browser, so I didn't think it would inconvenience me much.) Imagine my surprise to find out that re-enabling it fixes all my problems with Chrome.

I'm still sticking with Dolphin because I prefer its add-on ecosystem, but it's nice to have options now.

A Farewell to Windows XP

After nearly a decade of using Windows XP, I've finally moved to a more up to date operating system. I am now the proudish owner of a Lenovo H420 running Windows 7 Home.

The excitement of a new computer is always soon tempered by the realisation of how many programs need installing on it, as well as the long slog of getting all your settings correct, and the other long slog of rooting out all the unwanted rubbish that the manufacturer thought you might like. I bought it on a Saturday, but wasn't happy with it until Sunday the following week. (Not that I spent eight solid days on it, mind.)

Mostly it went very smoothly. In the case of Google Chrome, it was almost effortless: as soon as I enabled Chrome Sync, it transferred all my previous settings, and even installed my chosen set of plug-ins. Python was a less happy experience, when I discovered that the last of my essential libraries wasn't available in 64 bit form, and so had to uninstall all the others and start again with the 32 bit versions. I had similar incompatibilities with 64 bit Eclipse and Java. That, though, wasn't my fault, as the Java download page doesn't offer you a choice, and merrily installs the 32 bit version.

By last Sunday most of my treasured functionality was available again; I just had to add a folder to my $PATH variable. I brought up the System section in the control panel, and got two shocks. Incredibly, the editor for environment variables is still the cramped, rubbishy little box it was in the nineties:

How hard would it be to give us a proper dialog for entering these values? Instead you have to type in a list of semicolon-separated folder names, nearly all of which start with 'C:\Program Files' so you quickly get lost if you try scrolling through it. Unbelievable. Contrast that with the improvements made to the 'Extract All' option for zip files: Windows XP brings up a three pane wizard, while Windows 7 sensibly combines these three into a single screen. I cannot believe nobody at Microsoft finds this editor annoying. Maybe it's legacy code that Steve Ballmer wrote, and everyone's too scared to change it.

That was my first shock. The other came when I happened to glance at the installed memory figure. 2.00GB? The PC I ordered had 4GB. And what's this? A Celeron processor, where I thought I had bought an i3 core. Yes, I had managed to come away from PC World with the wrong computer. I'd reserved a £350 Lenovo H420 on their web site, then gone to collect it. They'd given me the £270 version instead. The receipt was okay though!

The details were there to see on the box, but I'd been too busy opening it. And the Intel Inside sticker on the front of the PC did say 'Celeron'. But I put 'desktop' PCs on the floor, so the sticker ended up conveniently situated at carpet level.

PC World offered to wipe the PC I had and give me the correct model. However, as they'd proved incapable of getting the correct box out of their back room I decided against handing over a computer full of my personal details in the hope that they might remember to clean the disc before they sold it on. Also, after all the work I'd put in getting the PC up and running, I was in no mood to go back to square one. In the end I settled for a refund of the difference in price. The main reason for buying the computer in the first place was to get some more speed, and this machine seems fast enough.

Here's some advice for PC World at Clifton Moor, York: when someone comes to pick up reserved goods, wipe the goods through your barcode scanner, not the reservation paperwork. As to Lenovo, given that a naming system that brings forth such memorable gems as 'H420' allows for 26000 possibilities, maybe you could try not giving two different computers the same model number. As for me, I've learned the importance of reading the label before opening the box.