I finally had enough of internetnews.com’s intrusive CPU-eating ads and remembered that there was a Firefox add-on for the job. I have snagged Adblock Plus and can vouch that for its effectiveness. It also works with AccuWeather.com, a site about which I complained a while back. I just wonder why I didn’t thin of this earlier; it certainly beats what ZoneAlarm could do. Now, I see why its functionality has raised some hackles but if advertisers didn’t overdo it in the first place, there would have been no problems. Well, that’s marketing for you… And yes, we do want the right to ignore ads.

I have had to stop using the Accuweather.com website because of annoying pop-up advertisments, the origins of some of which are branded hacking websites by the firewall at work. Even with Firefox, the whole approach is painful with windows popping up asking to install some utility software onto my home PC. That is certainly something that I am not going to do and the whole in-your-face approach seems direputable in any case. It is all very much over the top and I intensely dislike the hard sell mentality and will not be returning: it’s an effective way to drive away visitors.

Firefox 2.0.0.2 has made its appearance and the CPU usage bug seems to have gone away. We’ll see how it goes… Also, a new version of the Accuweather.com powered ForecastFox plug-in has come out. It was when I was using it that I noticed heavy CPU usage but the behaviour has yet to make its reappearance and I hope it never will. Now, I can get back to enjoying this very useful widget.

ForecastFox should be a useful utility, adding a weather toolbar to Mozilla Firefox as it does. However, it developed a penchant for hogging the CPU when I upgraded from Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 2.0.0.1. I’ll hold out for a new version to see if the problem has been sorted. You can find out more here.