Ok, the war is on. Does anyone know of a good HTML5 ad blocker?
Flash was awesome. It made it really easy to block animated ads. My browsing experience had been wonderful ever since I installed a Flash blocker a few years ago. Also did wonders for my battery life.
Please, please help my browsing experience remain wonderful. Thanks.
You don't know if a site contains ads until you visit it, and by then, they've already passed off your information to their Ad network partners and exposed you to the risk of Ad network malware.
The safe thing to do is to block Ads by default. And only disable them when they've shown that they're not just letting mass third party Ad networks embed arbitrary script in their page whilst harvesting your private information.
The safe/private thing to do is not visit any website at all. Ads don't have special access to your computer that a normal website does not. By visiting a new website, ads are by far the least of your worries.
Being online at all exposes you to risk and creates a footprint of your existence. Much like moving around in public does. And just as in moving around in public, the safest and most private thing to do is to not be in public at all.
You're ignoring opportunity costs, even in your meatworld analogy. There's real dangers to staying at home all the time, from social isolation to diseases of inactivity. Similarly, without using the web and visiting new sites, you're missing out on a lot of opportunity to communicate, learn, and yes, buy things. It may well be a lot less safe to avoid those things in the longer term.
Personally I block ads because I value my attention higher than advertisers value it. There is always an adversarial function built into ads; the advertising wants your attention, if nothing else, while I am interested in maintaining my focus. For similar reasons, I disable auto-suggest in Google search, animated gifs in the browser, and I use flashblock in all browsers that support it.
Anything continuously animated on the page whatsoever - no matter whether it's an ad, a subscription div popup, a "read next article" popup link, or a sharing toolbar - I block them all with element hiding helpers.
Because the greatest risk to me in browsing a random site is getting distracted and sucked down some rabbit hole. I use all the tools at my disposal to eliminate visual distraction.
You're right, there's risk in any action. The solution is to accept the risk, not to harm others while trying to protect yourself.
By blocking adverts, you're harming the people who make the things you like, in direct proportion to how much you like their content. The more you visit their site, the more load you make them pay for without giving anything in return.
If you're okay with harming others to keep yourself safe, and harming your ability to consume additional content from the people you want to consume content from, then fine. Continue to block ads. But know you're part of the problem, and are being selfish.
Ads don't have special access but because of their deployment across many different sites they get to track a much broader amount of your web activity than any individual site which in turn makes them a bigger privacy threat.
I don't block ads but I do use NoScript which means I rarely see them. It is increasingly common for pages to load scripts from dozens of different providers and those sites I generally turn away from.
Privacy threat? Because they want to serve you content you actually like? No, I don't think you know what a privacy threat actually is, then.
If you want to hobble around the web like it's 1995, that's your business. If you want access to content that's paid for by adverts, however, you need to be counted. That's the only way that content will be produced at all. You're not only harming the content producer, you're also harming yourself by lowering the number of interesting things in this world.
I don't think that's completely fair. The people who are providing the content on a lot of web pages are not the same people who are responsible for the monetization scheme. Some sites have good/decent content, but really obtrusive advertisements that the authors aren't responsible for.
The people providing the content are still being supported by the monetization scheme - you're taking money from them when you use their content without viewing their ads.
No. Those people are exposing us to mass cross-site tracking before we even get to see their content, without our permission, and without most people even knowing it's happening.
The only relevant thing you've mentioned in your list is pop-up blocking, which is a subset of advertising (cookie blocking doesn't prevent impression and click tracking, and Readability has nothing to do with ad blocking, as the most common use case for Readability is after you've visited a page already).
Blocking one form of advert is not even slightly the same as blocking all forms of adverts.
There is an implicit social contract created when a content distributor attempts to monetize the content - you can only obtain the content if you go through the monetization strategy. Sometimes that's a price on the content, other times that's an advert.
Circumventing the monetization strategy is a statement that you believe you're entitled to the content without paying for it. Almost universally, you're not, and this entitlement complex is pervasive through Internet users. TV shows, movies, music, software, anything that's been given artificial scarcity is a target for this entitlement attitude.
For some content, this attitude doesn't hurt the content producer enough to be meaningful, or the content producer has adapted. This is almost universally the most valuable and previously established content producers. Your large game studios, your record labels, etc. For other content producers, however, those who aren't as well established, the harm is more severe. The independent web comic, the unsigned band, the budding writer, the local newspaper. These people suffer because Internet users think they deserve the content these people create without providing compensation, and subsequently, less content gets made, talent can't be developed, gifted individuals can't specialize, and the world is a less beautiful place.
So sure, we can continue to use ad blockers, but at what cost? It's not hurting U2, and it's not hurting J.K. Rowling, but it's hurting other people, people who feel the kinds of pain a 1.5% vs. a 2.5% CTR might bring.
> Blocking one form of advert is not even slightly the same as blocking all forms of adverts.
Well good, then you just misunderstood me. I'm asking for an animated HTML5 ad blocker to parallel a Flash blocker (or pop-up blocker, etc.) Not something that blocks all ads.
Although you didn't state it specifically, presumably you're ok with pop-up blockers. And therefore accept that it is ok for consumers to override the choices of bad web site designers in some cases, not merely choose to never visit the site again. Flash blockers did the same thing. Cookie blockers and readability are relevant for the same reasons. Consumers have a vote on how the web should be designed, too.
> Consumers have a vote on how the web should be designed, too.
Exactly the wrong-headed sense of entitlement I'm talking about. No, you absolutely do not get a say, whatsoever. You either get the product through the monetization scheme set up by the content owner, or you get no content at all.
Your foot stamping and insistence that people shouldnt have any control over site content does not infact change the technical reality that they do, being as its their client on their machine displaying what they tell it to.
Its better to just accept this fact and work with it than attempt to boil the ocean.
one might also ask about what kind of entitlement an attitude like yours is bringing to the table.
I guess the mindset comes from TV/Radio land where content is just dished up, and there is only one way to consume it, or you can stop consuming it.
It's probably more an issue of, we are in a difficult situation where some businesses don't know how to monetize outside of advertising (like google). And if everyone could block them, you'd effectively destroy businesses like that.
But on the flip side, the advert business model have gotten everyone used to 'free'. If google started selling "Search packs" where you get 100 searchs for $20, I don't think people would go for it.
This has nothing to do with radio or TV, this is simply trying to keep the lights on. How is a web service like imgur going to keep doing what it does without adverts?
It's a practical problem as much as a moral one. Content producers need to pay the bills somehow, and ads can be an effective way of doing that, if people don't try to circumvent them.
This isn't about what you can do, this is about what you should do, and what damage you cause the content producer and yourself when you decide you're entitled to something without paying for it.
You're the one with a sense of entitlement. If you want to go down that road, you should only put your sites in pay per view locked-down kiosks, or something similar that enforces your perspective.
Um. I get the content however I want. It's my computer.
If you send me some data. I can choose to view or ignore any of it. You have absolutely no stance to make me acknowledge all of it, or any of it.
If I asked for some data from your server and you sent it, you sent it. But I don't have to read all of it. Even the bits that make you money.
Further, some people choose (or more likely didn't know they had a choice) to make you money, if you want their money, in aggregate their wishes are something you are interested in. At no point does entitlement enter into this.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I sent my data with the social contract that you'd also look at my monetization technique.
By breaking that contract, you're preventing me from producing more content, content you apparently want. You're actually hurting yourself, from a practical standpoint, as well as causing harm to me.
Advertisements have a measurable cost on me. I have limited focus, losing it is expensive to me. I've seen advertisements change the thinking and perception of my peers, and it scares the crap out of me. I am all for uplifting the community through my actions, but this cost is too great. I have an extreme distrust of advertisments anyway, I never click on them (except by accident, which was frequently btw, until I started blocking them), so even If I acknowledge them, I'm still not making you money.
and finally, this is just a side note which I think only applies to me, most content I consume only has advertisements introduced by the gatekeepers (or I pay for it). Youtube, blip, et al. I'd rather the producers just use distributed systems, but we can't always get what we want.
If the cost is too high, don't pay for it, but don't take the content as well. That's theft.
And I mean social contract as in a contract you agree to by simply being part of society that stands above law. Don't kill people, don't steal things, that kind of thing. Things you do and are therefore allowed to be part of society.
Society allows me to be a part of it because it has no objections to my behaviour. I actively tell the people around me I block ads. Therefore, if your social contract did exist, I would not be in breach of it.
Morals are subjective, the people that surround me believe there is nothing wrong with my actions, if your only standing point is that it's "morally wrong" then you have failed to convince me.
That, of course, is not your only point. You also believe that without the advertisements the content I enjoy wouldn't be produced. This argument has some grounds. The only problem is how actively degenerate ads are. I can outright improve almost all media just by removing them.
Let's say the "nightmare scenario" happens, and almost everyone blocks ads with ad block. Ad Block is running an initiative of acceptable ads. Ads that arn't decietful, distracting, or annoying (which, in my opinion, is a far more morally abhorrent act). So if everyone started using ad block. The world would actually get measurably better. Not worse.
The product server throws bits at you, and your software displays them however it's setup. It's not an entitlement issue, it's how you let any browser/server/thing consume bits sent by any server (instead of, say, requiring some sort of specific viewer).
I used to put blank paper on ads when reading printed magazines because ads distract me. What am I supposed to with web sites? Literally cover the screen with paper?
One is answerable with fact. The other is unanswerable with anything but subjective opinion, and inevitably drags the ensuing thread into pointless back-and-forth over, in this case, particularly well-trodden ground.
And here we go over the well-trodden ground yet again. "Should" according to who? You? See the problem there? It's perfectly possible for other people to have equally valid moral positions as you while taking a different stance on this specific question.
Trying to dictate morality never ends well. Especially in cases like this, where the specific tech is not only possible, but also has unarguably legitimate uses, and is therefore pretty much inevitable. You just end up tilting at windmills, and the ensuing hot air back and forth just creates pointless noise, generally adding little to the discussion.
Readability is in Safari, so many (many) millions of users. There are extensions for basically everything, bookmarklets for everything else, and many news-reading applications use the same scripts to render their 'text' views.
And popup / cookie blocking has been standard (not just common!) for a while, so I assume you didn't mean that.
So, a website provides content to you without a membership free at the "cost" of also having ads on the page. Which you may or may not choose to ignore.
Your response to this is circumventing the ads and blocking them, denying the service which you use any revenue from you. Awesome.
How about if a site has intrusive over/under ads or otherwise intrusive behavior, you just don't visit it? And allow the sites you use that do ads without being jerks about it to actually continue to function and provide the service that you apparently value?
EDIT:
I'm not normally someone who crusades against ad blocking software, but your comment was extremely obnoxious and really annoyed me.
Can you give an example? The only issue I've ever had with ABP et al. is when I'm working on a site and forget to turn it off & I think my site is broken (because ad doesn't load). :p
One of our webdevs complained about some issue that was causing issues with our site in particular (regarding generic id names being blocked) and since then I've had several anecdotal instances where disabling adblock on sites seems to clear up nagging issues.
I haven't found a significant example of this, and I've been browsing with Adblock Plus for years. The only place I've seen issues with is some video streaming sites, when it interferes with streaming ads.
Doesn't Adblock Plus alter the structure of the page, which can mess up layout?
Also believe it or not I don't want to block all ads, just animated ones. I want a general solution for All People, not just us nerds, and erasing advertising from the web would destroy a lot of businesses.
I want something browser makers can build in and turn on by default, which is what Safari has essentially done now with Mavericks (Flash and Java are blocked by default.. Flash under the rubric of power conservation).
There's a setting in ABP for Firefox that allows you to show "placeholders of blocked elements". I think that's what you're after if you want to use ABP and maintain the layout?
Maybe a crowd sourced blocker would be ideal for identifying divs in a site.
It would be a plugin that allows you to mark a spot on a page that is an ad and the plugin will record the very specific CSS path and hide it permanently for you and others that go to visit that site.
Maybe once you have a significant number of CSS paths you could do something with machine learning to identify the likeliness of a div containing an ad and block it when it crosses a certain degree of confidence.
NoScript blocks all javascript except for a whitelist you have to construct. That's way too disruptive as a general solution. We need something easy and automatic.
NoScript blocks all javascript except for a whitelist you have to construct.
Blocking JavaScript is just one of NoScript's many features. (NoScript's other features include blocking plugins and other embeddings (e.g., HTML5 video and audio), as well as protecting against XSS, CSRFs, and clickjacking.) I use NoScript, but I don't use it to block JavaScript. NoScript's ability to block HTML5 video and audio is one of my favorite features, and I hope that NoScript will block additional HTML5 annoyances in the future, especially as advertisers and other troublemakers make greater use of HTML5.
Entitlement? He is entitled to not download and view content that he doesn't want to.
No one is obligated to alter their own behavior in order to sustain someone else's business model. How publishers make money is their problem to solve, and if they're publishing content on the open web that's viewable with web browsers, then it's up to them to decide how to deal with the fact that some web browsers aren't going to download the ads.
They have plenty of alternative options: they can block all of the content unless ads are downloaded; they can put all of the content behind a paywall, etc. But most websites don't employ these methods, and do leave their content accessible to people who block ads.
No one is obligated to alter their own behaviour in order to sustain someone else's business model, that's why it's totally okay to shoplift if it's more agreeable and convenient to you.
It is impossible to read and understand text when there is something moving in the corner of your eye. The human brain was trained to do that for millions of years of evolution on the savannah. The moving thing might be a predator...
I'm sorry, but what's so wrong with not wanting to have advertisements on your browser?
People make their money via ads? Sure, why not. Do I always have to see those ads, and just sigh and "suck it up", even though it's potentially ruining my browsing experience? I don't think so.
I don't know about manish_gill, but I certainly wouldn't.
I guess the people running those websites will have to choose between continuing to publish content on the open web, knowing that some users won't look at the ads, or putting everything behind a paywall, knowing that some users won't subscribe.
Do you have a minimum amount of time you promise to yourself to spend gazing at ads in print publications too, to give the publishers what you owe them as a consumer?
Those are Facebook likes while the conversation is about ads on websites.
And in the end, he says that interesting content will get you "Likes," where in the current conversation of blocking ads does the visitor contribute after perusing the valuable and interesting content?
Yes, I realize that, but the idea holds. Subscription-based services work if the content is worthwhile. It is an alternative model to ads, sure. One that is proven.
Subscription based services are an alternative, but then you really don't the the ease of redistribution to friends and stuff.
Of course whatever floats your boat as long as there's some sort of compensation for the media one is ingesting. I don't really mind non-intrusive ads all that much.
Not at all. It's only entitlement if the publisher also provides me a way to pay them for the content (at the same rate that the advertiser is paying) and I still choose not to pay for the content.
I want to be the customer, not the product being sold.
I'm curious whether or not an embedded Esprima AST parser would provide a decent API for writing rules that detect undesirable code and rewrites them as no-ops.
It would be nice if this was also a social version of user scripts where I could visit all the user scripts that other users wrote that work on the page I am currently on. A button in the browser that takes me to all the user scripts that match the URL pattern for that page would be awesome.
Element Hiding Helper lets you target page components based on source. It has a standard filter for ads and other filters for egregious social buttons/trackers.
I also use it to remove annoying sign-up overlays and Google+ notifications when I search.
And if you add Stylish on top you can pretty much make webpages look like you want them to with 2m work - I often end up fixing huge ugly headers and the like (i.e. text size/color) on blogs I frequent!
If they're embedded iframes, you should still be able to use e.g. adblock based on the URL. If not, you can probably go back to element blocking, same as now for static containers. If they're invisible / removed from the DOM tree, it should be a lighter weight browsing experience :)
My best suggestion is Adblock Plus combined with Element Hiding Helper in Firefox. Gives you a menu item that lets you select an element to hide, with a custom CSS selector. If you can find it with jQuery, you can probably hide it with that.
I choose to let sites do what they want with ads, since it is their site and their business plan/model. I also choose not to visit sites that have ads that I don't like.
Flash was awesome. It made it really easy to block animated ads. My browsing experience had been wonderful ever since I installed a Flash blocker a few years ago. Also did wonders for my battery life.
Please, please help my browsing experience remain wonderful. Thanks.