Wow! Thanks for the advertisements, Wireshark!

Imagine my surprise when I upgraded my Wireshark instance to, as of this writing, 4.6.5, only to find advertisements and hints cluttering the side bar! I remember when this was Ethereal and the fun-hate that went around the schoolyard on pronunciation! Is it pronounced, “ah-theer-e-al” or “eethe-real”? Not to bring up bad memories for all the other old IT-guys reading this, but I always pronounced it, “Ethereal”!

But now we’re dealing with ads! What happened to the great and useful tool the community worked on? Guess everyone needs a little something for the effort and there isn’t enough in the non-development community giving their 3xT’s; Time, Talent, and Treasure.

I did a search to see if the good folks at Wireshark even warned anyone this was happening. To my chagrin, the search didn’t turn up the type of information I’d get if I were sniffing an Ethernet segment to isolate a slow application! They did offer an overlay at wireshark.org requesting donations and have always asked for more to join the community. All of this tempers my knee-jerk reaction of another great tool suddenly becoming another trashy has-been.

If you don’t like seeing the new ads, there are two bits of good news. First, as of now, Wireshark doesn’t reach out to an image or advertisement generator for the content, unlike the Brave browser. Second, you can disable this “feature” if you choose to do so. The process is easy and you don’t need to search a thousand YouTube videos to figure it out.

The easiest way to do this is to launch your new version of Wireshark, then:

• Select Help, About Wireshark
• Select the “Folders” tab in the About Wireshark dialogue box

This will let you see all of the called-directories for the installation. This is useful information if you wanted to go to GitHub, fork the code, and customize the application. For now, the installation calls those listed directories.

The directory you want to get into is listed under “Personal Configuration”. On my Windows 11 system, it’s located at c:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Wireshark. Open that directory, and look for the very diminutive file called “recent_common“.

This is the file the addresses certain, newly opened to Wireshark application, settings. There are other files in that directory that control the GUI, but to get the ads turned off, this is the one you need.

Now that you’ve made it to the proper directory, close the Wireshark application BEFORE you edit recent_common in your favorite text editor. If you fail to follow this step, and choose to edit the file, the Wireshark application will overwrite your edit. The reason for this is beyond the scope of this particular article, but, I’m sure other programmers on the internet will talk in depth about it.

Now, once you open the recent_common file, look for the following variables: