Opera with no ads

As long as Opera has no more ads, Opera with no ads is a dead project.

[image: An Opera instance which shows no ads]

News

September, 20th, 2005: Opera has launched Opera 8.5, which has no ads. Opera with no ads has turned into a useless utility.

Funny timeline, huh? September 12th: release of Opera with no ads. September 20th: release of Opera, with no more ads... (Who said Opera made a test on August, 30th, with a free registration and decided, based on this test, to remove ads? You really are a stupid revisionist!)

What?

A little utility to forbid the Opera browser to show you ads. And you don't have to pay for that.

Ah yes, it is in the public domain of course. Licenses are bad things.

Why?

The Opera browser is my favorite one. But I don't want commercials. So, I forbid this nice browser to download them and show them to me.

How?

Opera connects to the website 193.69.116.13 to get its commercials.

I made a dynamic library that redefines connect, send, recv and select, so that I let Opera believe it does real accesses to the website 193.69.116.13. But I indeed return to it my own data, which is a link to my website with the text: Free as in "Freezer".

Of course, a problem of this approach is that the site 193.69.116.13 becomes inaccessible to you. But I don't think there is anything of interest there, so it's not a big loss. (If you really need to access this site, go and use some other tool or launch opera instead of opera.hacked.)

Download

Initial release, Mon Sep 12 2005: libopera-0.1.tar.gz (7,377 bytes)

Usage

The code has been tested with opera 8.0 and 8.02 for Linux. If you have troubles using it, ask me, I may be able to help you.

You compile the program. Then, you copy libopera.so and opera.hacked in the Opera's directory. Then, instead of calling opera to launch the application, you call opera.hacked.

You should click Cancel in the Opera's starting screen that asks you the kind of commercials you want, so that the default "text commercials" remain in use. The other kinds of commercials seem to use different connections than the one taken over by libopera.

Oh, and if you still get commercials the first time you launch opera.hacked, you may need to clear the caches (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> History).

Links

The Opera browser.

noopads: a utility that hides the ads of Opera, for Windows users. Before Opera with no ads, I did this, which is conceptually the same thing than noopads for X11. But it was annoying and did not work 100% well. (I did not test noopads since I don't use Windows.)

Blocking Adverts In Opera: some info (maybe accurate, maybe not, I don't know) on how to block ads in Opera.


Contact: sed@free.fr

Creation time: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:45:05 +0200
Last update: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:30:21 +0200

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