LifeHacker.com ran a poll of their readers last week to determine what their “must-have” Firefox extensions are. Surprise, surprise — AdBlock was at the top of the list. LifeHacker is an ad-supported site, so the title for the post reporting the results is no shock.
(I don’t see any need to block ads, myself — but I do block any and all scripts and plug-ins, including Flash. [I’m easily distracted, so I can’t stand things that move on the screen.] The website owners still get their ad money for text-only ads, and I can tolerate their sites, so as far as I can tell it’s a win-win situation.)
I probably don’t really need to point this out, but if Microsoft were still the only browser game in town, everyone would be forced to see animated ads, everywhere. As evidence: back in the mid-nineties, one of my then-roommates started playing with Internet Explorer when it first came out, and he reported that the back button became far slower between one version and the next. When he dug into it, he discovered that Microsoft had changed its behavior — the earlier version retrieved everything from the local cache when you hit the back button, resulting in an extremely fast and efficient transition. But advertisers had apparently complained that they weren’t getting the additional hits on their ads, so Microsoft changed it to re-retrieve all graphic images when you hit the back button.
When all the competition is essentially free, people are going to go with the alternative that gives them what they want, rather than the one that forces them to take things they don’t want. Is it any wonder that people are switching to Firefox in such large numbers?
Thanks to this I decided to remove ABP on my own computer and just use NoScript. If I was browsing in Windows though a significant amount I’d probably have it installed, due to malvertisements.
NoScript alone blocks pretty much all malvertisements. The only ones that could get through it are image-based exploits, and so far as I know, there aren’t any exploitable holes in image-processing code anymore (or at least, nobody is known to have found one recently). Blocking all images as well would take care of those too, though I found it to be too annoying; I only block images from certain mostly-animated-advertising-only domains now.
In most of my browsing, all I see are still-graphic ads and text-only ads, which I find completely acceptable. I still occasionally get an animated GIF ad, but there’s one other trick to make those tolerable — in Firefox, the escape key freezes animated GIFs and most other non-Flash animated graphics on the current page. It’s less drastic than blocking images from the entire domain.