BFilter 1.0.6 review

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BFilter is a filtering web proxy

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 0K
Developer: Joseph Artsimovich
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BFilter is a filtering web proxy. BFilter was originally intended for removing banner ads only, but at some point it has been extended to remove popups and webbugs. It can't be used as a general purpose filtering proxy because it was never intended this way.

For example you can't just block an arbitary object, you can only hint the ad detector in its decision making.

The main advantage BFilter has over the similar tools is its heuristic ad detection algorithm. The traditional blocklist-based approach is also implemented, but it's mostly used for dealing with false positives.

Unlike other tools that require constant updates of their blocklists, BFilter manages to remove over 90% of ads even with an empty blocklist!
The javascript generated ads are not a problem for BFilter, as it has a javascript engine to combat them.

BFilter is expected work with any browser that supports proxies (nearly any browser does), and can forward requests to another HTTP proxy.

BFilter is written in C++ and is distributed under the GNU GPL.

Here are some key features of "BFilter":
HTTP/0.9 - HTTP/1.1 support.
Persistent connections (HTTP/1.1 only).
Pipelining (HTTP/1.1 only).
HTTP compression.
Forwarding to another proxy.
All processing is done on the fly. It doesn't load the whole page or image before processing.
Heuristic and regex-based approaches to detect ads.
Detects and removes image, iframe, flash ads, popups and webbugs.
A javascript engine to combat js-generated ads and popups.
Heuristic analyzing of images and Flash files.

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