FilterGate

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffMay 16, 2006This program demonstrates good performance against the majority of Net-borne ads but also provides a couple of handy extras. As is the case with many ad-fighting utilities, FilterGate sits in your system tray; right-clicking the small, green icon lets you access its bland but well-organized control panel. You can choose to allow ads on the fly by pressing a hot key, but you won't find a dedicated whitelist. This program did a good job of suppressing just about every pop-up, banner, and Flash ad we tossed at it, but even though we enabled sound notification, it didn't alert us when it quashed an ad. Therefore, we had to view the log to confirm the app lives up to its promises. FilterGate also can block cookies, referrers, and Web bugs to give you additional privacy protection. The AdultFilter feature, which prevents access to Web sites containing pornography, profanity, and violence, is a nice touch but produces mixed results. For testing purposes, we visited two well-known smut sites, but AdultFilter only blocked one of them. Thankfully, you can forbid certain URLs by adding them to a blacklist. We recommend FilterGate to privacy-concerned home users, especially those with children.