Tranquility
November 11th, 2007
In 2002, the most annoying thing about the Web was popup windows. Particularly those X10 ones. It was basically user harassment.
The Web is better now, but the proliferation of spam comments, link farms, text ads, and banner ads reminds me of urban sprawl. It’s not overtly threatening, but I do find it somehow numbing and soul-crushing. The bottom section of a typical Engadget post is a good example.
I don’t feel comfortable using Adblock or similar extensions, but I also wish I didn’t have to constantly ferret out camouflaged text ads and superfluous cross-linking. It’s tiring. I’d like to use a web browser that pushed the advertising a few more clicks away from the default homepage.
The Web would be boring without pages engaging in crass commercialism, I just don’t like the way it’s pushed into every corner of the experience.
November 12th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Do you not feel comfortable using ad-blocking extensions because you feel some obligation to load the ads if you view the content? I won’t comment on that view, but if you feel that way, you might still want to use Adblock Plus; you could restrict your block list to only include in-text ad link scripts and similar. You can always decide how what kinds of ads you want to block. For instance, I block most ads, but I don’t block ads by Project Wonderful because I like them and generally support sites that use them.
November 12th, 2007 at 2:23 am
If you dont like the ad blocking extensions you might want to try the NoScript extension which practically disables in-text ads and crosslinking as they both use java script.
as many sites dont require javascript to work its a nice helper