Even a single Web site might cycle through a network of tens of thousands of ads. But unless you block one ad at a time, how does AdBlock tell an ad from a legitimate image? AdBlock lets you block ads using filters that recognize content that comes from the same network as an ad you previously blocked. Rather than blocking one ad a time, AdBlock blocks advertising networks. Because most of the Internet's ads are served up by a small conglomerate of advertising networks, most ads disappear as soon as you've built up a small set of filters. Now for the good news: Expert users have already scoured the Web for months and constructed a filter list that takes care of most ads you encounter. I recommend the AdBlock Filterset.G Updater extension, which automatically configures AdBlock to use such a list and keeps the list up-to-date as new ad networks are created. How it works After installing the AdBlock extension, install the AdBlock Filterset.G Updater extension and restart Firefox. You might see two scary-looking notices as soon as you restart. These are harmless; select the check box and click Close in each notice. Now you're ready to start surfing the ad-free Web! Because the purpose here is to reduce distraction caused by ads, AdBlock doesn't replace blocked ads with placeholder images or anything else; it just leaves the space empty. And don't worry about new advertisements: Your ad filter list is automatically updated each week. REMEMBER AdBlock does the best it can to recognize and block advertisements, but some slip through anyway. Whenever you see an ad and sigh, just remember how things were before AdBlock!             A New Way to Surf with Mouse Gestures Extension Mouse Gestures Categories Message Reading, Navigation I started this book by saying I want Firefox to make the Web fun again. That's a pretty hard thing to do when you consider that the basics of Web browsing haven't changed in the past decade. You click Back to go back. You click Forward to go forward. How can anyone improve on that? Well, the other theme I harp on is making tasks simpler. And if you think about it, a step could be eliminated: moving the mouse all the way to the toolbar to click those buttons. (Hey, developers are lazy.) Sure, you could use the keyboard to go back and forward, but odds are that your hand is already on the mouse to scroll. The answer to your troubles - which, until a minute ago, you didn't know you had - is the Mouse Gestures extension. As its name suggests, a mouse gesture is a way to execute commands by moving the mouse in certain ways. In a gesture world, you don't move the mouse pointer to the toolbar to click a button. You press and hold the right mouse button (to indicate that you're performing a gesture), jerk the mouse left a couple inches, and then release the button. To go forward, do the same thing but jerk the mouse to the right. Gestures work as long as the mouse pointer is over the Web site. The backward and forward gestures are intuitive because you simply gesture to the left or right (respectively), but other commands - such as Close Page - are harder to model and have more arbitrary gestures. I list some of the more common ones in Table 22-1. After you get the hang of simple mouse gestures like these,