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Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

photo cred­it: Randy Zhang Google Chrome is no Fire­fox (yet). For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based sys­tems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very effi­cient, and stable. Pretty good per­form­ance for…

Google Chrome Logo
Creative Commons License photo cred­it: Randy Zhang

Google Chrome is no Fire­fox (yet).

For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based sys­tems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very effi­cient, and stable. Pretty good per­form­ance for a ‘beta’.

I do have con­cerns about the way Chrome appears to ‘mon­it­or’ my surf­ing activ­ity (by using Google Gears func­tion­al­ity), but then again, I use Gmail and oth­er Google Apps so I’m sure the Big G knows all about me at this point.

But, without plu­gin extens­ib­il­ity, Chrome is cur­rently a curi­os­ity. I won’t be using it for my daily work.

One major annoy­ance is the lack of Adb­lock. The web is a very mar­ket­ing-heavy place, and I prefer to select­ively view my advert­ising. The Adb­lock exten­sion for Fire­fox allows this.

To achieve an advert­ising-reduced surf­ing exper­i­ence with Chrome, I need to use Privoxy, a loc­al pri­vacy man­aging Proxy serv­er. It’s a quick install and seems to work flawlessly.

A solu­tion to this for now is http://www.privoxy.org/

1.) Install Privoxy
2.) Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner
3.) Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings
4.) A win­dows box pops up, choose LAN set­tings (at least this is what it’s called in Vista)
5.) Check off “Proxy set­tings” and in the address set­ting add127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118
6.) If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for loc­al settings”
7.) Click “Ok”, close chrome and restart it. 

Tada. Enjoy.

Geekzone provided the pro­cess (thanks guys!)

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Brad Grier

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6 responses to “Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy”

  1. TigerTom Avatar
    TigerTom

    It’s beta, and it’ll prob­ably stay beta. G00gle has a curi­ous habit of leav­ing per­fectly good soft­ware in Beta. ‘Beta’; the new excuse for not hav­ing to com­mit to anything?

    Reply
  2. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @TigerTom — Could be, though beta is short for beta test­ing, and by releas­ing a ‘beta’ to the pub­lic, you get the bene­fit of free ‘test­ing’ on a scale that nobody could afford to pay for in-house.

    Reply
  3. film fan Avatar
    film fan

    i keep learn­ing about more and more advant­ages and fea­tures with Chrome, with pri­vacy, for example; now if only they would take care of it’s cook­ie man­age­ment glitches…

    Reply
  4. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @film fan — Yeah, cook­ie hand­ling is pretty simple com­pared to Fire­fox. Since it’s still beta, I’m hop­ing it improves with the next version.

    Reply
  5. Circuit Breakers Avatar
    Circuit Breakers

    The prob­lem with Google is no add-ons avail­able yet and it’s so hard to use it when you work but it’s still okay because pages loads very fast.

    Reply
  6. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @Circuit Break­ers — Heh, it’s still Beta.

    And it’s open source, so if there’s some­thing you need, simply down­load the code, add it and recom­pile. There are a num­ber of Chrome vari­ants around currently.

    Reply

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