Is AdBlock a Must for Netbooks?
I have an Acer Aspire One D150 Netbook, and I love the thing. I use it to surf the web, take notes in class, program, read, write, watch videos; it’s a great machine.
But recently, my browser has been slowing down on account of the increasing number of heavy advertisements in the sites I visit. (Particularly flash-based ads.) These ads have gotten so frequent and heavy that they even manage to halt my browser altogether.
This isn’t at all surprising. My netbook, like most of them, has rather weak graphics capability. Added to that, the ads I’m grieved by in particular are the ones involving automatically playing video and flashy transition effects. It’s not hard to see why this sort of thing would slow my computer.
First of all, I think it’s worth appreciating the irony that a machine designed for surfing the net (a *net*-book as they say ) can’t quite accomplish this task. Alas.
The obvious solution to this issue is to install the very-effective Ad Block Plus plugin for Firefox. Bang! No more ads.
However, I haven’t been using this plugin already for minor-ly ethical reasons. Blocking ads on a site feels like a minor act of theft to me. I like finding good content on the web, and consequently I’d like the creators of good content to be supported. I certainly don’t want to sound judgmental of people who use Ad Block Plus. This is just why I haven’t been using Ad Block myself.
The point I’m trying to make here is this:
- Netbooks locking up on account of overweight ads takes the use of Ad Block Plus out of the realm of media-ethics and makes it a matter of usability.
When the online advertisements get too big, no-one wins: I have to be a bad citizen of the internet, the advertisers’ ads aren’t being displayed and content generators don’t receive ad revenue. The Ad Block plugin, then, is a sorry compromise.
(Besides: I’m certainly not going to click on any of the stupid ads anyway.)
Comments
Hey Cap’n,
I somewhat agree with you ethics – however, i too am becoming increasingly irritated by the bandwidth bandits these ads have become. I have very sketchy mobile broadband connectivity at times and the last thing i need is my valuable “up-time” being consumed by download irrelevent content.
Why dont you compromise and find a blocker that allows specific sites to be cleansed? that way your mind will be at ease.
Cheers,
Ben
Hi, Ben,
I primarily use Google Chrome, and recently I’ve been experimenting with their new plugins.
To a great degree, my problems have been solved with the FlashBlock plug-in https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemkimkhiilgffbjijcie
This will simply leave placeholders where Flash objects would be and give me the option to enable which ones I actually want.
Interestingly, I also use this very cool Youtube HTML5-ifier https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kchoimdlcbapmcdnheaahjcdpdjdpfco
which will take Youtube videos and replace them with an HTML5 <video> element, bypassing Flash altogether.
Chrome extensions are still fairly new, so we’ll see how this goes, but things are looking bright.
The temptation is still there to block everything, though… *sigh*
The ethics are very simple: Advertisers are attention/time parasites. You never have any obligation to them.
Note: I doubt you worry about the ethics of using a spam filter.
What do the advertisements themselves do to hurt you?
They are designed using market psychology to influence you as much as possible, even with just a glance, regardless of what you consciously think. They are not doing this to be friendly, they are the same idea as spam: collateral annoyance and wasted bandwidth are okay as long a few customers are brought in.
What do the advertisements themselves do to help you?
When you are actively looking for a product you will use a search engine to learn all you could want about the options.
Arguably a random advertisement may educate you about the existence product that you are glad to learn about, but looking at a vast number of ads to reach that coincidence is a poor use of your attention/time.
Do ads help support websites that you like?
Let me turn it around to ask: Do websites you like inflict ads on you?