There have been a lot controversy about Ad Blocking lately after Ars Technica published an article called Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love. However, these are not news. Two years ago someone at CNET wrote Who blocks the (ad) blockers? It didn’t impress me at all. If you follow Hacker News, you probably had read a few of the responses Ars’ article triggered. Some of them attack to the ethics of advertising, for instance, or the low quality of the ads displayed. But I don’t pretend to embark on a moral debate here, I’m exhibiting which are the reasons that drove me for Ad Blocking.
- Resource consumption. Websites these days are really resource consuming. All that Flash, JavaScript libraries and so on are way too much for my old desktop machine (a Pentium 4 3Ghz, 1GB of DDR400 RAM running the latest Ubuntu). Flash and animated GIF Ads create an extra computer horsepower demand that results in making my web surfing experience slower and worse . I used to open at least 10 tabs in my browser, so if I let each page display all those resource-greedy Ads, trashing starts and party is over. Finally I opt for killing my navigator and starting over…
- Software problems. Unfortunately, Firefox is not like Chrome or IE8: it runs everything in the same process. Most of the sites I visit don’t use Flash at all, but for the Ads. Guess who’s responsible for most of my Firefox crashes. You named it: Flash. And yes, I know there an add-on called FlashBlock, but why should I care if I can solve two problems by the price of one?
- Nagging content. Have you ever been reading an interesting article but can’t focus at it because there is one of those flashing animated GIF that leave you catatonic? Or what’s worse: have you ever had opened more than 20 tabs and one of them started making strange sounds and you didn’t know where it came from? That annoys me indeed.
- Offensive/Inappropriate advertising. I don’t know how you feel about nudity, but I think it is not something appropriate to watch at the workplace. When I am reading a computer programming solution on a website and there is an Ad portraying semi-nude people, I feel awkward. No matter how open-minded my employer could be the first thing I do every time in every company I join is installing Ad Block Plus and getting rid of possible future embarrassing situations.
Which are your reasons to support Ad Blocking?
