I just have to agree with brotherS and the rest of the Ad Muncher users on this forum, it really is a great tool. Over the last few years, I've noticed a tendency with online newspapers and gaming sites getting infested with advertising to the point of being almost unusable. The solution to this for me, before discovering Ad Muncher, was using a ad-blocking hosts file. As many of you know, that method has some serious limitations and in the end I had to give it up. After that, I tried out the Proxomitron and while it packs some serious power, I found that it just wasn't worth the effort to keep the lists up to date & working. I can imagine the pre-made lists you find over at the CastleCops forums are great if you mainly visit English websites, but none of them really took good enough care of many of the Scandinavian websites I visit. In the end, I grew tired of it and moved on. Then came Firefox and adblock/-plus. At this point, I had been using Opera for many years, but the promise of proper, and easily maintainable, ad-blocking made me test the waters with the now famous ferret. While I really liked the adblock extension, I did not really find myself comfortable with the Firefox browser itself. So, I moved back to Opera like I've always done in the past. Now I do love the browser, but it does lack proper ad-blocking (even with the content blocker built into v9 of the browser, it's still nowhere near a complete solution yet), so I went out hunting around the web. By chance, I happened to stumble upon the Ad Muncher entry over at Betanews and thought it looked interesting, so after a very quick (less than 0.5 MB) download I started browsing like my life depended on it. After all, I had no intention of paying for the software if it didn't take care of the websites that are important to me. The same week, I paid for and registered the application. It had everything I'd ever wanted from an ad-blocker. The default lists are very very complete, and has handled just about every single non-English site I've ever visited as well. It also impressed with the speed, and it also allows me to configure anything related to the filtering with a few simple mouse clicks. When you also consider that it works with just about any application connecting to the web, with the same rules applying to all of them without having to setup anything, it's hard not to be impressed.
As for my statistics so far, it has saved me close to .5 GB since my last re-installation of Windows (I forgot to backup my config file, so the old stats were lost). While the program isn't free, I feel that I've received more than what I paid for it after being stuck with a 56k modem during this Christmas. The ads on many websites are a pain with a broadband connection, but those times when you're stuck with dial-up the web is just about unusable without proper content filtering.
Ad Muncher Usage Statistics for v4.7 Build 27105/1459
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher: 55,883
Approximate bandwidth saved: 436 MB
Counter started: november 28, 2006
