How Can I Block Websites in Mozilla Firefox?

A lot of people have been working on the problem of blocking websites since the dawn of the internet era. There are a few ways to go about this, and people have spent an equally long time finding countermeasures. You can either go with a site-by-site basis, or a bulk package that is preconfigured to block common bad sites. There are ways to go about either, and they can be combined with ease.

The single most common website blocker is Adblock Plus. Adblock, a plugin available for most browsers, is primarily designed to block ads. It is one of the most popular methods out there, and you can black list entire sites rather than just the ad sections. Adblock is not the best choice to block entire sites, but you can use it that way. Its main advantage is that you can have great control, like blocking access to sites or sections of sites on some pages but not others.

Webpage visited With Adblock Plus off

Webpage visited with Adblock Plus on

Flickr images courtesy of guido_cc

Another simple easy way to block sites is with another plug-in, Blocksite. Figuring out how to use Blocksite is much easier than with Adblock, Although Adblock is far more popular. Blocksite does one thing and one thing only, it lets you create a black or white list to filter what sites you can use. This will even prevent you from clicking on links to those sites in the links. A blacklist simply prevents you from using sites included in the list, and is the most popular blocking method. A whitelist is more severe, you can only use the sites in the whitelist if you make one. This option is best if you only want to visit a handful of sites and are fine with manually adding exceptions. To see how to use the plug-in, you enter the preferences, and select the main options such as, blacklist or whitelist, and enabled. Then, click “add” to add a website. The filter list supports the “*” symbol, which is a wild card. It means anything can go there of any length, adding “*.com” would filter every .com site on the internet.

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The last resort to make absolutely certain that your computer will never go to a particular website is to modify your “hosts” file. This is not recommended, as it is complicated. If you forget how to do it, you’ll have a hard time figuring out what change later. If you want to do it, the change will mean that no program can go to that website domain name.

In your windows directory, usually at c:windowssystem32driversetc , you will find a file called “hosts”. Open this file with notepad. It will give you instructions on how to add a website. Add the site you wish to block and set the number to, 127.0.0.1, which tells the computer that you are the website. This will prevent it from leaving your machine.

As a final note, this does not filter the site’s IP address, something even more advanced. If you get that far in you might need an expert.

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Website Blocking

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com