There may be hardly few Firefox users who don’t know about the Adblock plus extension. Adblock Plus is used as the online ad filter by many users. But using a large number of self defined filters in Firefox can make it really sluggish. Long self defined filter lists makes Firefox sluggish because every page that is loaded is checked against the filters each and every time. However we can solve this problem to a great extend by optimizing the filter lists.
- To start with first you have to save your filter list.
- Then go to ‘Tools‘>’Adblock Plus‘.
- From settings dialogue box open ‘Filters‘> ‘Export Filters‘.
- Open Windows Explorer and open the text file with an editor like Notepad.
- Now select the entire content of the file by pressing [Ctrl] + [A] and copy tit to clipboard by pressing [Ctrl] + [A].
- Now go to the website http://adblock.free.fr/optimize/index.php?lang=en and paste the list there by pressing [Ctrl] + [V].
- Now check the options that are set. Please check that the ‘Optimize URLs‘ and ‘Remove Filters matched by others‘ options are active.
- If you are already using an optimized list the ‘Optimize including pre-existing RegExes‘ option must be activated. This will insert new filter list to the already optimized ones.
- Now click ‘Optimize‘.
- A dialog box showing the compressed list will show up.
- Select the optimized list and copy it to a new blank text file and save it.
- Now in Adblock settings dialog box, Open ‘Filters‘> ‘Import Filters‘ and now navigate to the new text file and click on ‘Open‘.
- It will ask whether to replace it. Now click on ‘Overwrite‘ if not Firefox will add the new one together with the existing one .
- Confirm it by clicking ‘OK‘. Done !
Now Firefox will filter ads faster than before. Make sure you do this at least once in a month.