I came across an interesting story the other day, linking to this site. It’s a site to send viewers who use Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers to because they have the ability to block web advertising with an extension. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Blocking any of your viewers from reading your site only harms you, even if they can’t see your advertising. Also, it’s possible that those viewers using Firefox aren’t blocking advertising, and have no idea what advertising blocking even is.
About 20% of my blog’s visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you were unaware, I have a seething hatred for Microsoft’s browser due to its complete disregard for web standards. Back in the old days, before IE7 premiered, IE was a security and feature nightmare. Now that it is ‘fixed’, I live with it. I still completely disrespect the application as a browser, but I wouldn’t ever stop you, my reader, from visiting Exposay.
To restore the balance, let’s learn how to block advertising in Firefox, our favorite web browser.
First, if you’re not using Firefox, download it here. Continuing on, visit this page on the Firefox Add-ons site, and install Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus will allow you to right click advertising on a web page and manually block pieces of advertising. However, that takes time. To solve this, visit this page on the Firefox Add-ons site to install the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, which automatically updates a trusted list of advertising servers to block. With those two extensions, you don’t have to do anything except enjoy the web the way it should be, without distraction.
There is a moral issue here, yes. Many websites need advertising to stay afloat, and I don’t doubt that. However, if you’re similar to me, disgusted by advertising to the point of wishing ill upon the product advertised, you’ll appreciate this. Furthermore, third-party advertising opens you up to a waste of bandwidth, loading slowdown, and diversion of attention. It’s your call.
I love the sentence “Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet”
PEOPLE NOT = INTERNET!!!
SERIES OF TUBES NOT = INTERNET!!!
DATA = INTERNET!!!
Onto the issue at hand, web advertising hardly increases the profits made by a company (similar to, but less effective than, TV ads). I say blocking ads is OK. And to deal with staunch Repubs, hang onto a copy of IE7, just in case.
Michael, I’m going to disagree with you. For high-traffic sites, advertising is all they have. Think big. Advertising is a huge business.
How does Google make their money? Their AdSense program.
Well, advertisers pay the sites, but are people really stupid enough… to… click…..
…
never mind.