AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Ad blocker firefox1/3/2024 Their business model gets a few more years of life before it sinks into obsolescence, taking me and my job with it. This way, all the media folks out there slaving to create the hot takes I read every day get paid. ("Whitelisting" just means telling your ad blocker not to block ads on that particular site it's done differently with different versions, but it's usually a pretty easy, one-click operation.) But I have made a routine of whitelisting any site I regularly visit for #media #content. (If you've spent years surfing the web with no ads, it is a shock to see the garbage that's still out there.) Most of the internet, basically. There are still too many ugly corners of the internet, where ad blockers are necessary for sanity. (Readers of my infrequent tech posts will recall that I still mostly use Firefox on a desktop, for the indispensable vertical tabs.) Finding a balance between ad blocking and Reader-ingįor a while, I tried turning off my ad blocker completely and just relying on Reader to declutter pages I actually need to read. It's that little book-looking icon in the URL bar: ( Mozilla Firefox)įor Chrome, you still need a browser extension to do it. It was recently made standard in Mozilla Firefox as well, in both desktop and mobile versions. This feature has been standard in Apple Safari for years. It takes a second or two longer, but that's a pretty small price to pay. Win-win! (To see the original page, you just click the button again.) So: I go to a page, the ads load, ad revenue exchanges hands, I click the Reader button, and I get to actually read things. The page, in all its ad-ridden glory, is still loaded just behind it. It's just a piece of Javascript that displays formatted text over the top of the page. They key difference is this: Reader doesn't block the ads from loading. I do an immense amount of reading online, so that's important for me. The font is bigger (you can set your own font style and size), the distractions are gone, and lo, I can actually read something on the internet without my attention wandering in 30 seconds. The Reader button is a magic little widget in your browser that turns this: ( Buzzfeed) The glory that is your browser's Reader button So lately I've been trying something else, namely using the Reader button more. This we're-not-saying-we're-just-saying approach is a transparent ploy to stoke the guilt of web surfers. Without ads, we can't pay our staff or feed our children. "We can't help but notice you're using an ad blocker. Instead, everywhere I turn I find the same passive-aggressive tap on the shoulder. The technology now exists for media sites to detect ad blockers and refuse to load content for those who have them. It has started to freak out media companies, especially given reports that ad blockers cost publishers worldwide some $22 billion in revenue in 2015. In the year leading up to June 2015, ad blocker use grew 48 percent in the US, to 45 million users. I've used one for more than a decade, but apparently it's starting to seriously catch on. (Fun fact: 99.9 percent of web ads are annoying.) It allows me to surf around without being slowed down and distracted by annoying web ads. Like more than a third of American adults, I use an ad blocker in my web browser.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |