Steve, over at In Your Web makes a good case for adblock. I quite agree that putting the control into the hands of users is the best way to handle most content on the web.
In the world of television, I watch -- and even enjoy, some commercials. Others I mute, change the channel, or skip over (TiVo.) I hold the remote control and that empowers me.
With Firefox, we're working hard to give users just that type of control with that power and ease of use.
What bothers you about the Web? That should be the question we're addressing as we push Firefox toward the next release.
Posted by asa at January 5, 2005 09:04 PMWhat I miss is a simple what to block plugins on a site by site basis. This bug is roughly what I'm talking about: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94035
Posted by: Joergen Ramskov on January 6, 2005 01:07 AMI have a problem with AdBlock. The problem is, if too many people will block all ads in web sites, those sites will shut down, or become subscription-only. I like it that most content on the Web is free, and I don't mind seeing some ads, if they help the content provider.
Posted by: Noam on January 6, 2005 05:06 AMNoam... I agree to a point, but it depends on the ads. Static ads are actually quite livable. Anyone who puts flashy animated ads on their site has no respect for their readers. Flashy, animated ads... or worse, ads with sound... make it virtually impossible to read an article on a site. Static graphic or text ads, on the other hand, aren't any more distracting than ads in a newspaper or magazine, and don't really bother me at all.
It would be nice if we could setup Firefox to make animated ads static... perhaps by having a default adblock configuration where, instead of blocking ads, it would leave animated GIFs on their first image. Flash ads could specify a static GIF in their calling code to be used as an alternative. You'd still need to configure URLs to block animation on as with now... but you'd still let the site be able to generate revenue.
Posted by: John T. Haller on January 6, 2005 05:23 AMso how about this, we can hide the ad, but still download them.
Posted by: cyfer on January 6, 2005 07:02 AMFunny, I just wrote about this issue last week. Like John, I have no problem with ads on websites per se, unless they distract from the content. Last week an encounter with an oversaturated site prompted me to install Adblock on a new sytem just to be able to get through the article I was trying to read.
The problem with advertising is that a balance is necessary: too few ads and you have no revenue, and go out of business. Too many ads and people either avoid your site or block the ads, and you go out of business.
Back on the subject of "things about the web that annoy me:" mandatory registration is a biggie. If I want to read an article on a news site, or post a one-off comment on a blog I'm not likely to revisit, I don't want to have to create a login provide personal info, etc. Unfortunately, short of integrated BugMeNot, there's not much a browser can do about that.
Posted by: Kelson on January 6, 2005 09:28 AMi think linspires version of mozilla has some sort of 'hotwords' thing going. u can left-click a word which brings up a submenu of things like "define", "acronym", "google". while fastdic and super drag and go do a very good job of this, i think that this is one of those things that would be well handled natively by the browser. it is regular, trivial operations like this - ones that really exploit the massive amount of info on the web - that u want to be as quick, intuitive and seamless as possible. similarly text links - something that afflicts this blogs comments!
Posted by: db on January 7, 2005 07:00 AM