I can only suppose that he maybe doesn't have the ad-blocking features in his browser that I (and lots of others) have.
-IainB
To be honest, I've given up on extensions. Most of the ones that I've used have simply been horrible. IF they even work, they grind the browser to a halt very quickly.
I used to use a few, but simply got sick of the sluggishness. I have far fewer problems with just the simple, stock browser. Some things I'll install, but ONLY if they're 1,000% necessary and I can't live without them, e.g. Firebug.
I still think that this is in part due to extensions using JavaScript. I simply loathe the language. It's just not a good language for the web anymore. It's slow and destroys the user experience far too easily with umpteen trillion "web developers" <insert profanity here /> writing quadrillions of lines of code for every web page.
Pages simply have far too much scripting in them now. And JavaScript isn't the right thing to deal with that. It's procedural. It's not an OO language. It fakes OO, but it's not. HTML is declarative. Like how does a procedural language fit with a declarative one? XML/XSL/XSLT works very nicely together because you have a functional language working with a declarative one. They work well together. They're elegant.
I recently TRIED to read a CNET news article... Nearly impossible. The page was so heavy with crap in it that I could barely scroll. No problems elsewhere. (I just installed another 8 GB of RAM in this box as well.) Bad page.
I just don't have the patience to deal with <insert more profanity here /> insanity on the web.
I just want the pages to render quickly so that I can quickly get through what I want/need on them, then GTFO.
Now, I have used some extensions that actually were pretty decent, but when push came to shove, they still slowed things down too much.
If we're going to have a hundred kajillon burble-farts of scripts running on every page, something a bit more sane than JavaScript would make the web a much better experience.
I think Microsoft really had it right with their basic architecture for running code in a web page. BHOs simply perform beautifully. Compiled plugins just work. I'm not saying "lets' run lots of ActiveX" or anything like that. I just mean that they had things working better.
If browsers are going to do heavy lifting, they need heavy lifting tools. JavaScript isn't for heavy lifting.
Then again, I could just be far less patient than most people...
</end rant>
