Hide ads on the page you are reading

Facts worth checking first

• What it does: Hide ads and promotional overlays on the current page. Auto-cleans on load, or right-click to clean, with undo.
• Page content, selections, and generation results stay on this device by default and are not uploaded to KnowIt.
• Free once the extension is installed.

Read the full FAQ

Design notes: Ad Cleaner

Ads are just about everywhere on the web. Pop-ups, sidebars, floating layers — they don't only break your concentration, they blur the line between what's content and what's promotion. There are plenty of ad filters out there, some paid, some technically formidable. As an early-stage tool built by one person, this one can't yet match those mature paid products on detection accuracy.

None of that stops me from building something honest, useful, and steadily getting better.

The thinking behind Ad Cleaner comes down to three ideas:

1. Free as a stance, not a marketing tactic

“Free” isn't a hook to get you to install it; it's the basis on which the tool exists. Filtering ads should be a baseline capability available to everyone, not a “premium benefit” billed yearly. I made it free because I believe a good tool doesn't need a price tag to prove its worth — people using it and telling me what's wrong is the return I care about.

2. Grant permission once, then forget about it

Ad structures on some sites are genuinely complex, and the tool has to read and parse page elements to filter them accurately. On first install it asks for the permissions it needs — not to over-reach, but so that filtering can happen automatically on every page afterwards.

After that one grant, day-to-day use takes zero effort. No subscribing to rule lists, no maintaining a blocklist, no tuning filter strength; ordinary users shouldn't have to spend energy on configuration. Install it, grant it, open a page, and leave the rest to me. You won't get stuck because you “don't know how to set it up.” I'd rather you simply notice, at some point, that pages feel a little cleaner today.

3. Honest about the gaps, still improving

I won't pretend otherwise: what it catches today is limited, and some complex ads or newer placement formats still slip through. But I treat those misses as a direction for improvement rather than a flaw to explain away. Every page someone browses is a chance for me to learn something. Later versions will keep sharpening the detection and refining the rules, so the results get a little better each time.