Ad Muncher 4.94

Overview

There have been countless times that you wished those annoying website advertisements and popups would just stop appearing. Some of them are not trustworthy at all, and sometimes with a wrong click you might even end up being redirected to a website that could potentially harm your computer. Ad Muncher will make sure that those ads are blocked from every website you visit and only the main content is displayed. But that’s not the only thing you gain from using it; pages load faster since there is less data to be loaded in the browser.

Installation

While following the installation steps, at some point you will be asked to choose if you want to add Ad Muncher options to the right-click menu in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. After that step the installation will begin and finish almost at the same time. You will then be redirected to a page from Ad Muncher’s website which informs you that installation completed successfully. All versions of Windows are supported, although the older ones (Windows 95, 98 and ME) need special settings for the program to work properly.

Interface

It’s hard to talk about the interface when the program runs in the background all the time. It has a taskbar icon from where you can open the settings window, update the program or disable filtering. The configuration window has various tabs in which you can view logs of all the blocked URLs and add your own filters to block more content. It is worth mentioning that one of the tabs is actually a chat feature that lets you connect to a chat room meant for help and support regarding the software, or alternatively send an email using the preset form.

Pros

Ad Muncher includes a long list of filters that greatly increase the number of ads it can remove, which you can also make longer by adding your own filters. It is updated by the developers regularly so you don’t have to worry about doing that manually.

The program’s another strong point is that you have complete control over it. You can configure everything; from keyboard shortcuts that perform various actions, to hiding your online tracks by stopping known third-party tracking systems.

Cons

A feature called IP Scrambler used to exist in previous versions, which in essence would hide your IP address and keep you completely anonymous while surfing the net. It got removed because it was quite old and better methods of keeping you anonymous made an appearance, with Tor being the best replacement for IP Scrambler according to Ad Muncher’s creators. Despite this fact, which is true nonetheless, IP Scramber could still be a working feature in the software even if it is outdated.

Alternatives

AdBlock Plus, being one of the most preferred ad blockers, manages to eliminate most of the ads you come across in the internet. It is not a standalone software but an addon for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and K-Meleon. Karma Blocker is an ad blocker as well, with the difference that it only works as a Mozilla Firefox addon and is intended for use from intermediate users up.

Conclusion

Ad Muncher is an exceptional software for blocking ads, but there are many free and equally efficient substitutes with support for different browsers - what makes it unique though is that only a handful of them have so many options.