Adblock

That's my argument for ad-block: why should I clog the internet with data that I'm going to ignore, and why should I waste CPU, memory and energy on displaying those ads?

The economic model that has an advertiser pay a content producer for my attention is not in my interests as a consumer. It skews the stories that writers can pitch to their editors. It stops freedom-of-the-press reporting and it queers the pitch of public discourse. Perhaps it's time for Linux news to stand up for free-as-in-freedom software reported by free-as-in-the-press news outlets. Free-as-in-beer? Have you had any free beer recently?

This is why I turned on AdBlock after years of avoiding it: DNS lookups were excruciatingly slow. The DNS problem turned out to be a configuration error on my part, but still the performance difference is remarkable. Besides the additional DNS lookup, most ads load loads of Flash and badly written javascript, slowing down rendering of the page. Then there is the fact that ads get loaded asynchronously, causing content to jump around while the page is loading. And I haven't even mentioned the seizure-inducing animated gifs.

I don't mind unobtrusive ads, but the web is infested with bad ads. When ads start being served from the same domain as the original content, without Flash or javascript, so that the page load isn't affected, then I'll turn off AdBlock again. Until then, I maintain a whitelist. It currently has 4 entries.

Also the advertisers were (for no obvious reason) among the heaviest users of some obscure whacky DNS software that implements just barely enough of the specification to answer A queries from Windows clients.

If you send such a server pretty much anything else, such as an AAAA query, it either silently discards the packet or it returns a NXDOMAIN for an unasked A query. Probably this was sold to the user as a "security" feature, the practical upshot is that lots of perfectly good implementations will stall when trying to connect to some of the popular advertising sites.

You would think that this was something advertising companies would want to fix, but it seems not. Somewhere along the lines "we make advertising" plus "people are annoyed by advertising" became "it's our job to annoy people" and so there was no interest in fixing the problem. I don't know if it ever got fixed at all.