how do I block downloading data from a web domain, including by javascript code?

Question

I am unhappy with google's javascript loading various BS from *.gstatic.com domain. I tried telling my firewall to block *.gstatic.com but apparently this only blocked loading webpages into the browser. Google's javascript seems to have no trouble loading the Google logo and whatever else it might load.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use a HOSTS file to block connections to a given domain. Pre-made HOSTS files are also available that block ads, banners, trackers etc. from a large number of sources; see this one, for instance.

Other solutions also exist. IE and Opera have built-in ad-blocking features, while Firefox and Chrome have add-ons that offer the same functionality.

Answer 2

gstatic.com serves static Googel files; like their Javascript, CSS and images and it's kind of wrong to black that. It functions as a CDN that caches most of the things that Google uses such that they don't have to serve it from google.com itself as that would be very costly in network performance.

You don't need to block that domain name as there really is no point in doing so. Another maintained hosts file that you can find is http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

Perhaps you could consider to combine both hosts files provided in these answers, first try replacing 127.0.0.1 by 0.0.0.0 because that's a better approach at blocking (it doesn't do requests to the local host) and if that doesn't work then replace in the reverse direction.

I'm heavily against extensions that process your web pages as in comparison to a DNS change that really slows down your browser experience as it obstructs the download/process/render loop...

Answer 3

You could use an ad-blocking solution for your browser. I use Opera, and it has a build-in content blocker. It uses a file called urlfilter.ini where you can define patterns of URLs that will be blocked. Similar solutions exist for most browsers (Firefox, Chrome).