FilterGate

FilterGate is a comprehensive software solution that ensures a distraction-free web browsing experience by blocking popups, banners and other kinds of ads, rogue cookies, web bugs, referrers, and other such irritating disturbances. It also features a parental control module with password protection that's capable of restricting access to adult-oriented websites.

Before proceeding any further, you should keep in mind that this is a very old application, and the project has been discontinued.

When running the installer, FilterGate asks you to close any active browser beforehand. Setup takes little time and minimal intervention on your behalf. Once it's over, it's recommended to restart the PC to finalize installation.

At startup, the tool creates an icon in the system tray area and sits there silently without interrupting your regular activities, while ensuring browser protection at the same time.

According to the developer, FilterGate works with any browser installed. However, since the program's so old, this is not a guarantee for the latest browser editions.

You can bring up the configuration panel to tinker with the popup, ad and privacy filters, as well as enable the adult filter and set up a password to unlock it.

The software application is equipped with weapons for blocking popup windows from known advertisers or upon page loading/unloading, unintentional, loud and flash popups, banner and tower ads, blinking text, MIDI background music, ads stored within the page header, along with banner-sized graphics.

It can filter referrers, cookies and web bugs, or restrict access to adult sites by blocking search engine results, allowing references to blocked content and web-based email, and so on.

It's possible to create a whitelist or blacklist for most of these modules, as well as to reset the entire configuration to default. Plus, FilterGate compiles statistics with various aspects, such as the average download time of an ad, enabling you to inspect log files.

The tool's light on system resources consumption, so it doesn't hamper PC performance. However, taking into account its age, FilterGate cannot ensure up-to-date protection, so you should take a look at other ad blockers, such as Adblock Plus, AdFender or Adguard Web Filter.