iGardener
Level 1
(0 points)
Q: help with overabundant ads
I would like to ask for some help from the support community. The problem is overabundant ads on Safari and Firefox. Having difficulty with a new machine after about 16 years as a mac driver. There are nine Apple products in the house.
The new machine ... here two days ... is at the low end of usable on familiar sites such as youtube for viewing traditional music. Problem noted on many other sites as well. Sheer volume and persistence of ads is unlike anything I've seen before ... a bit of a circus ... and the overall experience falls somewhere on the spectrum between unpleasant and unusable.
Aside from this the machine itself is outstanding.
Background:
Beginning migration from baseline:
iMac 27 Mid 2010 < fully backed up on two separate external drives
OS X 10.8.5
2.8 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Safari 6.2.8 (8537.85.17.9.1) < ghostery blocking all trackers - list updated 02/19/2016
Firefox 43.0.4 < ghostery blocking 2079 trackers - not the up to date version of Firefox
Two days using new machine - migration not finished:
iMac 27 Late 2015 - purchased as refurbished product
OS X 10.11.3 < newest update
4 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
Safari 9.0.3 (11601.4.4) < newest update
Firefox 44.0.2 < newest update
What happens:
Some sites trouble free, for example support.apple.com; weather.gov.
Ads show up on youtube that appear to come from youtube but that do not appear on the iMac Mid 2010 machine.
Other ads appear on other sites ... a profusion of them.
Some but not all ads are targeted, revealing what appears to be complete tracking of clicks. A bit spooky.
Ads pop up in the sidebar of youtube that do not appear on the iMac Mid 2010 machine.
Safari accumulated cookies from 260 sites ... all but 6 never clicked on ... never such volume on iMac Mid 2010 machine.
Steps taken:
Reviewed material available from Apple support - Stop pop-up ads and adware in Safari - Apple Support - HT203987
Reviewed some but not all previous threads on this topic.
Deleted all cookies.
Cleared history.
Tried various combinations of the above with restart.
Ran hardware reset of AirPort Extreme wireless router. Reset IP address and wireless channel.
Checked ghostery.com - previous version does not appear to be available there - new version does not have the same capability.
Used Wireless Diagnostics - Utilities - to check traffic on the WAN. New machine is busy in the background, apparently pre-fetching content.
Reviewed settings for example firewall and "block pop-up ads" check box.
Next steps to evaluate:
Carry out detailed steps in HT203987.
Run a clean install of OS X 10.11.3 and start over.
The problems began immediately, right out of the box. So I stopped migration, and at this time have little data at risk. The clean install option is thus a reasonable next step. The procedures outlined in HT203987 look more like dealing with malware than setting ad preferences. With malware a clean install can be the best way to go.
Insight from more experienced members of the community would be welcome as to:
What is the cause of the night and day difference between the experience on these two machines?
Is there any wrong step I took that caused this?
What is reasonable to expect when running Safari 9.0.3 on the iMac 27 Late 2015 and OS X 10.11.3.
What next steps do you recommend?
Thank you!
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
Linc Davis
Level 10
(207,963 points)
Ghostery does block some ads, and it's still available. From the Safari menu, select Safari Extensions... and search for it on the page that opens.
