The author writes about actively blocking things and that's not something that just happens, it's something they chose to do:
> Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care.
Occasionally I will try to help someone with a lot of browser extensions installed who is confused about why some website doesn't work and does care, and the first thing I will recommend is creating a fresh profile with no extensions and seeing if that works.
Meanwhile, I tend to browse with fairly vanilla settings, so I'm not going to see the problems they see. I do see ads sometimes. Maybe I should block them, but often I will just go to a different website. I guess that's similar?
In some sense, we are seeing a different Web because we are running different web browsers. That's going to be true anyway, though. People have different preferences about which websites they like.
Right, yeah I see your point. I am closer to the author in that sense: I don't trust most browser extensions and I try to have as few as possible, but I still have uBlock origin. Maybe in the past I used to be fine with all the ads anywhere, but after years with an adblocker, the Web without it is unbearable for me.
I recently decided to try "I don't care about cookies" (Firefox extension), and it feels really good to not have to spend 2min trying to find the hidden "reject all" button on all those popups :-).
> Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care.
Occasionally I will try to help someone with a lot of browser extensions installed who is confused about why some website doesn't work and does care, and the first thing I will recommend is creating a fresh profile with no extensions and seeing if that works.
Meanwhile, I tend to browse with fairly vanilla settings, so I'm not going to see the problems they see. I do see ads sometimes. Maybe I should block them, but often I will just go to a different website. I guess that's similar?
In some sense, we are seeing a different Web because we are running different web browsers. That's going to be true anyway, though. People have different preferences about which websites they like.