Sunday, November 6, 2016

Best and Safest Image Blockers for Firefox, Mozilla Image Block

The best and safest image blockers for Firefox webbrowser and detailed instructions on how to use them

 Note: There is no way of blocking images in Firefox without extensions. Enter any of the links below with caution.

 Note: Since “Wizmage Image Blocker” for Google Chrome is so much more easier and convenient to use but is not available in Firefox, I would simply recommend everyone to just download Google Chrome and Wizmage Image Blocker with Fast Image Blocker instead as described in this article since I fear the more “trouble” people will have to deal with while using an image blocker could make them neglect or stop using it partly or even completely.

 Fast Image Blocker

 Direct download link to Fast Image Blocker for Firefox:

 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-blocker-plus/

 Note: After installing it, click on the camera icon and remove every single site already put into the “exceptions list”. This image below is my own example I did so you can understand what to do (I would not put these sites in exception otherwise):

Note: Press the X icons in the circle in order to remove a website. There are a lot of websites put into this list as exceptions as you will see after having installed the program (not a smart move, since it makes people think the program doesn’t even work!).

 Only add exceptions (the + icon with the address already inserted) that are absolutely necessary or needed, since it won’t block images on that site if you have it added.

 Note: The right arrow is pointed to where the exception button is located.

 Also, when clicking the camera icon, if the camera icon in the menu is colored, this means the image blocker is activated; if it is grey, it means it is disabled for all websites.

 Note: The down arrow is pointing towards the activated and colored camera icon, which means that it is activated. If you press on the colored icon, it will become grey and disabled.

 Remember to remove exceptions if you need to avoid seeing images on a site if you added an exception you should not have added.

 Pros: The advantage with this image blocker before all others is that it blocks every single image on all websites (except for addons mozilla) which no other image blocker does as far as I know.

 Cons: The only problem is that in current version if one puts mail.google.com, or translate.google.com etc. in the exception list, all of google.com will become an exception and hence show images (it is the same with yahoo and perhaps other websites as well). There is an easy solution for this explained a little below (if you know what you are doing) that has to do with blocking those images with an adblock (see the header “Codes for manually blocking google content with adblock filtering rules” further down). But this solution is unsafe if you have added a lot of subdomains into the exceptions list and you often visit those domains unless you manually block them all (which is highly inconvenient and not easily done by inexperienced users). So the only real solution in that case would be to have another image blocker activated at the same time. But doing this will complicate everything considerably and is not recommended lest people grow tired and give up; which is why I recommend that the reader simply use Google Chrome instead as described here, since it is so much more convenient and user friendly.

 I have emailed the developers about this problem and feel confident that it will be fixed shortly (or so I hope). So hopefully this will not be a problem for most people reading this and it is not good to put exceptions into Fast Image Blocker if the main domain becomes unblocked as well since this is not safe to do, and if this is the case and if this problem persists and sites shows you images, you must have to use one more additional image blocker since God’s law of avoiding occasions of sinning demands this of you.

 Another easy solution until they have fixed this problem would be to just not put any exceptions in Fast Image Blocker on dangerous sites and that you just disable the program temporarily for a site if images are needed or necessary (just do not forget to activate it again!). You could also add an exception temporarily (just do not forget to remove it afterwards!).

 Note and Problem 2: In order to not have to disable the Fast Image Block extension all the time in order to see an image in Firefox, you can just right click on the hidden image and then press with the scroll mouse button on the “View image” option. This will lead you directly to the image in a new tab so that you can see it and so that you don’t have to disable the image blocker completely and hence enable all images (which is unsafe to do on most sites). So this feature would be a little similar to Wizmage, although, not quite, since Wizmage works much better, and in fact all the time, in displaying the images. But the problem with doing this in Firefox, which makes Firefox inconvenient and unsafe to use (unless one is determined to essentially never enable any images at all), is that the image blockers in Firefox collapses or removes the images and image place holders, which means that on a lot of the images it will not be possible to right click and view them unless one disables the image blockers completely. This is the greatest problem with using Firefox (or any other webbrowser) compared to using Chrome/Opera where one can almost always have an easy option to display any or all images in a safer way.

 Note: Facebook is not a safe site and people who think they can surf this website with images on are blind and crazy since this website is filled with immodestly clothed and sensual looking women.

 Solutions to some known problems when using Fast Image Blocker

 Problem: When I enter a PDF file with Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome the PDF file won’t open or load and remains black.

Solution: Temporarily disable Fast Image Blocker, reload the page and the PDF file will load and show itself. This problem happens because Fast Image Blocker apparently blocks Opera’s and Chrome’s images of the PDF file when looking at it from the browser. This problem does not seem to happen in Firefox with the default settings since Firefox uses another approach in showing the PDF files. But it could happen depending on how the user decides to show the PDF files in their browser.

Problem:  When I enter a youtube video the video won’t play and the screen remains black.

Solution 1: You may have an extension forcing youtube to play their videos in flash format rather then in html5 format. If youtube play their videos in flash format rather then the html5 format, it won’t work.

Look through your addons and delete the following kinds of extensions:
YouTube In Flash [and those with similar names]
Disable YouTube HTML5 [and those with similar names]

This should solve the problem.

Solution 2: Install the following extension which you can activate in order to force youtube to play their videos in html5 format:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-flash-html5/

Note: The above extension can force youtube to play videos either in html5 or flash format. After you have installed it, flash is on by default. Click on the icon, then select the html5 icon on the right side and change it to the html5 format. The program should now say in the text below the flash and html5 icons: “YouTube HTML5 Player is Active”. You can now hide the program from the extension bar so that you don’t have to think about it anymore.



Solution 3: You may have Fast Image Blocker enabled on youtube. Fast Image Blocker won’t work on youtube, even if you play video a in html5 format, when you have certain flash/html5 blockers enabled. If you use any of these Flash and HTML5 Blockers for Firefox, you need to disable this image blocker for youtube.com to work properly and instead use this Image Block extension for youtube instead.

 Please see the Best and Safest Flash and HTML5 Blockers for Firefox for all the details on how to make youtube work with flash and html5 blockers enabled.

 Solution 4: If it still don’t work then you must have more addons causing problems. Delete one after another of those you think are suspect until it starts working. If nothing works, delete all addons and start over, there must have been some conflict. If nothing works, then contact me and I will try to help you, since it is important to surf the internet and youtube with a complete image blocker and flash blocker enabled.

Solution 5: Surf youtube and other video sites with Google Chrome, since this is also totally safe if you follow the instructions as detailed in the “Google Chrome Image Blocker” section.

The reason I mention these solutions when it comes to watching or playing youtube videos is because I don’t want people to stop using the extensions completely if they don’t work as intended; otherwise I would prefer that no person watch youtube videos and only download them as mp3 or only listens to the audio. Watching motion picture media is an occasion of sin when we do not know what the video or film contains, and this shows us that God requires us to only listen to the audio of a video if we want to please Our Lord, since one may not risk one’s soul just because one wants some entertainment or fun in watching motion picture media. It is easy to just scroll down and see nothing of the screen while listening to the audio, or downloading the audio, or following our instructions.

Important: Since the image block addon recommended above for youtube does not block every image, and cannot add exceptions, it is not recommended to use that image blocker by itself except when surfing on youtube with Firefox.

 Image Block

 Another image blocker I recommend that you install (for reasons we will get to later in addition to those mentioned above) is this one:

 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-block/

 Note: When this image blocker is displaying a red circle over the icon, it means that it is activated and hence not showing any images. When it is showing itself like a normal icon, it means that it is unactivated and hence showing images.

 Activated (not showing images):

Unactivated (showing images):

Pros with using this image blocker: It does block all image on the addons.mozilla.org domain which Fast Image Blocker for some reason does not.

 Cons with using this image blocker: It does not block as many images as Fast Image Blocker for Firefox and is therefore not completely safe to use. It also does not show the image place holders and removes them (unless the website displays such holders itself) which is a little irritating if one wanted to right click on the image and press “view image” since doing so would show the image content in a new tab if one pressed the scroll mouse button (but this is impossible to do if the program removes the image holders*, which in turn will tempt people to enable the images instead in order to see them). The program also cannot add exceptions which makes it burdensome to use since one would have to enable and disable it all the time in order to see any blocked or hidden images.

 *Fast Image Blocker also seems to remove image place holders in Firefox. This makes me suspect it is a Firefox issue rather than an issue with the extension. Even though some extension do remove image place holders, Fast Image Blocker certainly does not do this in the other webbrowsers.

 Also see: Why you should completely disable images in Internet Explorer even if you never use it.


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