The latest version of a Web-browser add-on promises to screen cookies, ad banners, Java applets, background music files, animated gifs, background colors, and other Web-site bric-a-brac that its author characterizes as "Internet smog."
"It places the user back in control," Barry Jaspan says of interMute, the $19.95 proxy program that he developed to give users more control over perceived clutter, such as ad banners, which pay for many sites.
"I am not opposed to Web advertising," said Jaspan. "But I am when it detracts from the sense of the page - when it detracts from your ability to get the information that these sites claim to give you for free in exchange for seeing ads."
Jaspan's interMute is a Java-based browser add-on that works with the Microsoft and Netscape browsers, and as a proxy, it sits between the browser and the Web. The utility watches for - then discards - potentially irksome HTML tags such as background music. Several control panels allow users to configure which Web gewgaws are screened from which sites. For example, a user might set interMute to muffle Java applets on one site but not others. And unlike other filters, Jaspan said that blocked .gif images do not appear in the browser as "broken" image icons.
The program has been available as a beta since mid-1997 and Jaspan said roughly 3,000 people have been using it. The latest 1.0 version was released yesterday.
Jaspan also aims to purge banner advertising - though it is not successful at this task all of the time.
"It looks for pretty clearly identifiable ads," he said, noting that the program looks for typical banner heuristics such as aspect ratio, or dimensions, but doesn't use anything sophisticated such as artificial intelligence.
The Web banner-blocking concept is well-trodden ground. The first product to do so, Internet Fast Forward, came out several years ago, but was never marketed after it was acquired by Pretty Good Privacy. More recently, the porn-blocking company Solid Oak Software offered a banner-filtering plugin to its CYBERsitter customers. Internet Junkbuster is also available for free download to users who want to screen ads.
"The majority of [banners] will always remain unfiltered," said Jason Catlett of Junkbusters, the company behind Internet Junkbuster. "The people who are willing to make the effort to install the plugin or download the proxy are probably the people who will never click on the banner ad anyway."
The interMute utility works on any Java-supporting platform, including Macintosh, Windows 95, and Unix. It is available as a free trial version from the company's Web site.
