I dislike advertising when I'm online...

I've always been able to block most ads using Firefox with plugins like Adblock or Adblock Plus.

However, text ads displayed directly in the HTML are hard to block. You can't just filter out images or scripts or servers. Adblock Plus element hiding helper allows you to very easily select any element on the page for hiding, ie any section of text. This works fine for the likes of facebook, who seem to be stupid enough to put their ads in a div with class="adcolumn'. You can hide a div like this with little fear of hiding any genuine content. However, Google are a little smarter. When you are on google.com they don't give their ads any sort of special identification, so if you filtered them out, you'd probably end up filtering out other good stuff. However, Customize Google is another Firefox plug in that somehow (I'll have to look into how) blocks all Google ads. Awesome, ad free bliss!