I was reading an email from a friend the other day telling me where she and her family had gone on vacation (Rehoboth Beach, Delaware). I wasn’t sure where Rehoboth Beach was, so I opened up a browser and went to mapquest.com.

The mapquest link showed up in my Firefox address field but nothing appeared in the main browser window. I tried a refresh, and still nothing appeared. I looked at the status window and saw that the browser was trying to load a link from some domain called ar.atwola.com… Which didn’t sound as if it was related to mapquest.com. I was starting to wonder if my browser had been hijacked. But I tried going to a few other sites (CNN, BBC, etc.) and they came up fine.

So I did a google on ar.atwola and found that it is a adserver run by AOL Time Warner. It seems that mapquest has some ad’s on their homepage that are served by the Time Warner server… And it appeared that the Time Warner server was having a bad hair day.

I still wanted to use Mapquest to see where Rehoboth Beach was so I thought about how I could get around the problem with the ar.atwola.com site.

And I remembered reading about the Firefox Adblock extension. I use Firefox as my main browser anyway so I found and installed the Adblock extension. I went back to the mapquest site and it still hung on me but I then used Adblock to identify and block all the ar.atwola.com links on the page. I then refreshed and, voila, mapquest worked and I figured out where Rehoboth Beach is (south side of the mouth of Delaware Bay).

My compliments to the folks working on the Adblock Project http://adblock.mozdev.org/index.html

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 7:48 pm and is filed under FAQ, browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.