Google Earth for Linux [LWN.net]

Google Earth for Linux

Posted Jun 15, 2006 0:51 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285)
In reply to: Google Earth for Linux by man_ls
Parent article: Google Earth for Linux

They *do* make money off google earth; there are ads when you search for locations. Not that this necessarily justifies it being proprietary, but it is hard to see free software working as adware- people would immediately start hacking the ads out.

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Google Earth for Linux

Posted Jun 15, 2006 22:43 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't know, for all I can tell they might texture the buildings with ads to make their money. Hard to hack that out if it is well done. And after all, I block most ads on Firefox but the images are served, advertisers don't seem to know about it and we are all happy.

Google Earth for Linux

Posted Jun 16, 2006 6:01 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

How do you block ads in such a way that images are served? All the web
advertisement blocking software I've ever used prevents the advertising
images from being downloaded entirely.

Google Earth for Linux

Posted Jun 16, 2006 7:02 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

If you right-click on an image, Firefox will offer to "block images from" the originating site. Useful for graphic ads, since they are normally served from specific servers; the image is downloaded (if you look carefully at the status bar you will still see a request to that server) but not displayed. Effective and integrated in the browser -- one of those nice little features Internet Explorer will never have.

Add to this not having the flash plugin, and browsing becomes a pleasant experience once more. (Text ads are shown, but they are normally unobstrusive and once in a while even useful.)

As to click-throughs on those ads, I have always thought that 90% of them are done by mistake. So the probability of an ad being clicked on is just proportional to its size. It still holds with blocked ads.

Google Earth for Linux

Posted Aug 17, 2006 12:54 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I can assure you that Firefox's Adblock does not download the
advertisement images.