Alt text: a screenshot of an article that is over 90% covered by ads.
I’m sorry to inform you that there might be some content leaking through your ads.
Browsing the internet on mobile devices has gotten so bad in the last few years. It’s all but guaranteed that at least quarter of the space on any website is going to be taken up by floating ads that don’t move as you scroll. Some of them it’s over half. I cannot understand how normal folks navigate the web without adblockers.
Yo, after I switched to Firefox, I realized its mobile app offers ad blocking add-ons for mobile. Holy shit was that a dealmaker for me. I actually want to browse the web on my phone again.
uBlock Origin is very powerful thing. It can remove link tracking (I posted links before if you’re interested); it can remove parts of site; it can change JavaScript and its response. Basically, everything is possible.
I was trying to learn c++ there was this really great and free site. I decided to turn ads on for them since everything was high quality and free.
There were a few ads that played, but they changed every few minutes. The ads were not the same width, so they they changed they pushed the text around.
So in the middle of reading all the text would jump around and make you lose your place.
It basically made their site completely unusable.
The intrusiveness of ads is bad, but the fact that code I don’t want and didn’t explicitly authorize is running on my machine is a massive security hole. Not too long ago hackers infiltrated the ad networks of major newspapers and replaced the ads with propaganda.
We have no idea how many times exploit code has been put on these ad servers. And we’re just supposed to trust a bunch of sysadmins to make sure the javascript that lets them track us hasn’t been replaced with something nefarious?
For me the tipping point was when ads started becoming malicious. As long as ads are not static and are being served by unaudited and unregulated third parties, they have no home on my browser. I feel bad about it because I understand that some independent sites legitimately need the revenue but unless they provide information about how they vet their ad providers or they only serve static ads, I’m going to block them.
