I’ve had enough.
Too many sites are using badly flawed “active server” techniques to pour reams of advertising down our throats. It makes those sites effectively unreadable. Particularly annoying are the ones that use half-clever, “anti-adblocker” techniques to circumvent the visitor’s protections of his browser.
In consequence, users’ browsers are freezing and their attempts to surf away are being impeded. A great deal of irritation and hostility have resulted – some of it mine.
If that strikes you as a minor nuisance, think about this for a moment: “Smart TVs” are integrating browser capabilities into their standard, central function. Do you own one? Do you expect to own one? Would you like your television to freeze the way an overrun browser does?
I will list offenders here as I discover them. Today’s offender is Breitbart.com. This is unfortunate, as there’s a lot of good material there. But that doesn’t win them an exemption for freezing Chrome and Internet Explorer on consecutive visits.
For the moment, Brave.com, a browser explicitly designed to block all advertising ab initio, appears to thwart the push-purveyors...though I’m sure they’re working on that. However, for the present I intend to use Brave.com exclusively. Though it’s in beta-test, I recommend it for general use.
We’ll see how matters develop.
Been using Brave since the first beta was released Francis. It's not perfect, but then what browser is? Generally pleased with it, especially since Mozilla excommunicated Brendan Eich for donating 5000 bucks to the anti gay marriage prop in California.
ReplyDeleteGood morning, Fran
ReplyDeleteI no longer have to look at embedded adverts and other unwanted material on the web sites I read because I installed a plug-in called "Reader" ... used with RSS feedreader NewsFox in FireFox browser.
Reader is described as: "... the ultimate Reader tool for your Firefox that ... provides you the best reading experience by transforming text on any website using fonts, colors, and layouts of your choosing in a clean and distraction free environment."
I receive no compensation for this endorsement.
I just downloaded and installed Brave. What a difference! Much faster. Thanks for the tip.
ReplyDeleteNRO is another bad one. Every time I go there I end up with their ads stuffed in behind the browser page. And it's very slow to load pages, with a lot of jumps up and down as stuff keeps loading.
ReplyDeleteI gave up on Chrome a few weeks ago because it was continually being attacked by popup ads, and the worst-hit were pages with lots of links. Some blogs were OK, but ebay was terrible. Oddly enough, Facebook was completelly immune! Norton and Malwarebytes kept harmful files from getting into my hard drive, but loading and reading web pages was just becoming impossible. So not knowing what else to do, I went back to Firefox. I'll check out Brave, though; wish I'd known about it before.
Be careful with Brave. If I'm not mistaken, I read on their site that they operate on a "white list" with advertisers that pay them to let their ads through. In other words, most/all of your http requests are funneled through their servers, "bad" adverts are stripped and "good" adverts are inserted. I may be wrong, YMMV, but do understand that you still have fairly large attack surface with this browser though Brave is supposed to be keeping that kind of thing out.
ReplyDeleteThey have to make a buck somehow. TANSTAAFL.
If you have an older machine/OS, NoScript for firefox or palemoon helps cut down on things.
ReplyDeleteMonty
Opera 40.0 says it blocked 91 ads on breitbart.com, and the number keeps climbing. Perfectly readable without the ads.
ReplyDeleteI check the link before I click. As you mentioned, Breitbart is a no-go, NRO and a few others. Too bad as there may be a story or two I want to see. Also, some websites are well over 80% ads looking at the page as a whole. A tiny bit of the story and the rest ads.
ReplyDelete