Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Adblock Plus: the nuclear plug-in (nice blog post)

(1/5) > >>

mouser:
Interesting article and blog essay on Adblock Plus, a FireFox plugin to remove ads from web pages.

Adblock Plus: the nuclear plug-in
Adblock Plus, the Firefox browser plug-in that erases advertisements from web pages, is a killer of a killer app - or at least it would be if it became widely popular. Right now, it sits like a coyote at the edge of the net, quietly eyeing all the businesses it would happily devour.

The plug-in, writes Noam Cohen in today's New York Times, has the potential to be an "extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered. From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter."

--- End quote ---


http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/09/adblock_plus_th.php




Adblock Plus: http://adblockplus.org/
NY Time Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/technology/03link.html
Blog Essay: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/09/adblock_plus_th.php

icekin:
Its not a bad program, but Firefox is a memory Hog. I personally found AdMuncher (http://www.admuncher.com/) to be far better, even though it does cost some money. It filters from everything that connects to the internet.

Customize Google (http://www.customizegoogle.com/) is another extension that can remove the Google Text ads on Firefox.

Tekzel:
They can moan all they want, but if they had kept the online advertising to a SANE level, there may have never been a reason for an adblock.  However, they had to go and make huge flashing banners, annoying whackamole ads.  Put ads in to the point that they overwelm the content many times over.  So, you do what you do, and I do what I do to put a certain amount of sanity back into my browsing.  Frankly, it doesn't really matter to me, I am not the advertisers target audience.  I am less likely to buy your crap the more you put it in my face anyway.

Lashiec:
The irony is that the guys at the New York Times achieved what Nicholas Carr feared, exposing AdBlock Plus to the mainstream. Next thing we'll hear is sites either blocking Firefox, or blocking those users with the installed extension (so far, I think there's no way to query the extensions used by Firefox). I saw in another forums how the threads related to ad blocking were immediately closed. And AdBlock Plus it's easier to use than before.

At least they didn't mention the real usage of Opera's content blocker...

About ads, I don't mind seeing them, but it really bugs me to see ads loading first, Flash-based ads 'flashing' me all the time, ads with sound disrupting my music (HATE IT), and those new Flash ads that appears in front of the text. You click the 'close' button and... surprise! You've launched the ad site, because greedy authors made the button in such way that you have to press an exact zone of the button to close it (and a small zone to make things more difficult). If they make ads to be less intrusive, I'll gladly deactivate the content blocker, but this is not happening soon. Last thing they did is add ads to Ubi Soft games, you get them for free, but you have to withstand ads everytime you save or you enter the menu.

f0dder:
There's already tricks to detect if a user is using an ad blocker... I've seen it here and there.

<3 AdBlock pluy anyway.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page