Download: Simple Adblock

While many website depend on advertising, some take it a little too far with so many that it becomes very annoying. Simple Adblock is an add-on for Internet Explorer that can remove all traces of adverts from websites.

Read more: Web browsing tool reviews

Installation is fairly simple. When you click on the Download Now button you will go to the Simple Adblock website. Click on the blue download button and then run the program when it has downloaded. The installation wizard looks like that of a normal program, rather than the way add-ons are installed in Firefox.

Inernet Explorer will start at the end of the installation. You will need to click on the Enable button at the bottom of the screen to start Simple Adblock.

Simple Adblock works in the Status bar, which we didn't have enabled on our test machine. To see the Status bar, press Alt, click on View, Toolbars and then Status Bar. It didn't appear after this until we restarted Internet Explorer by closing down all of the tabs.

When enabled a configuration page will appear where you can select your country for specific ad filters. It is also possible to set up privacy filters that block tracking scripts on web pages.

Click Submit to save the changes. Then click on the 'Test your adblocker' button. This will load a special page with elements that should be blocked.

It did a good job of blocking ads without doing anything dreadful to pages. On some pages it removed the entire section of the page, not just the image. This has the advantage of making it feel like the ad was never there in the first place.

There were a few hitches – Internet Explorer crashed a couple of times and the Videojug website wouldn't play videos until we disabled Simple Adblock on it.

There is also a limit on this free version of Simple Adblock of 200 blocks per day.

It is possible to mark websites so that Simple Adblock does not modify their pages. Click on the Simple Adblock icon in the Status bar Disable Simple Adblock on... and then select the website. The option above this in the menu can be used to temporarily disable Simple Adblock.

Updates are detected automatically and are easy to install.