Central Ad Filtering with Privoxy

Recently I do hesitate on chosing Safari 3 as my primary browser at home on my Windows box. A big minus was this browser cant support externa plugins like Mozilla or even Opera. As a normal user, a daily reader of the big WWW I definitely need an ad filter. I have a really slow PC:

With this loose configuration flash stuff and huge ads simply eat the memory, bring the CPU to 100% So to say, it is not OK.

One option could be buying a new PC. Cheap and that. But no, I wont buy a PC anymore.

The second option is to set up some ad filtering stuff that preserves my resources to what I want to do.

Given the case, Safari has no ad filtering extension for Windows, I've chosen a well known solution in the area of *nix people. They often use powerful tools to filter out the spam, worms, ads and other junk that agressively target your box.

So I'm proudly using Safari 3 now as my primary browser with a central ad filtering based on Privoxy. Setting up a proxy for HTTP and SSL connections is easy. Surprisingly Safari has no proxy settings pane of her own, just inherits from general Explorer settings. It wasn't a problem for me, just sounds weird.

For a non *nix user the configuration could seem crazy, but Privoxy has excellent documentation and a simple, self-explanatory web interface sitting on the localhost. A nice GUI could help this nice tool to gain more attention. 

I don't see any performance issue at the moment - in the next week I'll play with config options eg. with the blocks-filtered-out messages for newly recognized ad blocks.