Hackszine.com: Add-Art - turn the adverweb into an art gallery

Add-Art - turn the adverweb into an art gallery

Add-Art is an ad blocking extension for Firefox, but it's a bit different from other ad blocking hacks. Instead of simply removing ads, leaving a score of empty holes in ad-laden sites, Add-Art replaces all those nasty skyscrapers and leaderboards with a selection of images from a contemporary artist. The image above, for instance, is a cropped banner from Add-Art's current show, Hotel Vue des Alpes by Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg.

In addition to turning your browser into an art gallery, blocking ads might actually speed up your browsing experience a bit. The Add-Art images are distributed with the plugin and are loaded locally from your machine, so there's no download involved for any of the ad units. Just think of all those bytes you could be saving while viewing lovely mountain scenery instead of dancing mortgage dudes.

Add-Art Firefox Plugin
Hotel Vue des Alpes

Posted by Jason Striegel | Jun 30, 2008 09:30 PM
Firefox | Permalink | Comments (3)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: wintermute on July 1, 2008 at 2:33 AM

Firefox3

Great, but it isn't yet compatible with Firefox3. Bummer.

Posted by: sam on July 1, 2008 at 6:13 AM

It's a good idea but I hate the fact that I pay good money for advertisements on top sites and more and more browsers/plugins keep coming out that stops people from seeing them.

Internet advertising is a doomed market

Posted by: Matt Katz on July 4, 2008 at 10:53 AM

Firefox3

Hi - I'm one of the developers on Add-Art, and we are a bit stumped about how to get it to work on ff3. We really really want to get it working, but we are having trouble as the ff3 guys essentially identified the image swapping that we do to get the art in as a security issue. So they "fixed" it.

Supposedly there is still a way to do it as an xbl binding, but we're having a tough time hacking it in. We'd sure appreciate it if you could call out to your readers about this - we could use some help. We're open source, and it's easy to get started with us over at http://dev.eyebeam.org/projects/add-art
Thanks!