One thing about surfing the Web that bothers every sane individual on the planet is the obnoxious ads that litter the pages of the Web everywhere. Now, I'm not going to rant about advertising in general nor about the proliferation of advertising in our society. Advertising is here and always will be. Like any other industry, it depends on a perceived or real need for its services to survive. The fact that it is so ingrained in our society supports the fact that it will go no where anytime soon. In addition, like any other successful industry, advertisers will always seek new markets, new mediums, and new methods to deliver their spiel to the consumer.
However, the fact that many regard the advertising industry and the billions of dollars it generates and invests every year as a nuisance means that for every new market, every new medium, and every new method they devise to deliver the goods, another enterprising entrepreneur will devise a way to circumvent the advertising. VCRs have commercial skip buttons and you can also rapidly skip commercials using PVR devices like Tivo and ReplayTV. The medium that is still struggling for a way to make ad elimination mainstream is the World Wide Web.
The problem with the WWW is that there are so many ways that ads can be embedded in to the requested content or otherwise forced on visitors that it seems as though there isn't a single solution for them all. And as far as I can tell, there isn't. With television and radio, advertising is a part of the content that is presented in a single threaded way. When the content is pre-recorded, you can skip it. Personally, I change the radio station or turn on a CD when it's commercial time on the radio. With the WWW, the problem is that so much information can be presented in a multi-threaded kind of way. The user dictates the pace at which content is presented, however the organization and presentation of that content is still controlled by someone else. Thus, advertising can take the form of images throughout the page, text and images presented in the middle of the requested content, overlays using Flash and Shockwave (*cough*ESPN.COM*cough*), pop-up or pop-under windows, or even (one of the most obnoxious ones ever devised) using clickthrough pages that randomly appear and force an extra page load and an extra click to get to the content you already thought you requested (IGN is notorious for this).
Of course, all this doesn't mean there aren't multiple, good methods for eliminating the vast majority of ads within the World Wide Web. I've been able to have a very pleasant and virtually ad-free experience for quite some time now by making one significant change to my Web browsing experience - I changed browsers.
<AWTY™ Diversion> - Are you getting the idea yet that these happen frequently and tend to be long? Here we go...Hi, my name's Doug and I'm a recovering Internet Explorer user that's been clean for 3 years (Hi, Doug). The first browser I remember using was Spry Mosaic that my Dad purchased (from an old Egghead store, IIRC). Anyone who's ever looked at the About box in IE knows that it says, "Based on NCSA Mosaic.". Naturally, that was where my web browsing progressed to.
I was first lured to Mozilla by the prospect of multi-tabbed browsing. Being a multi-tasker of the highest order when it comes to computers who was doomed to experience dial-up until about a year ago, I always had 5+ IE windows open. Being that my OS of choice is Windows 2000 and I can't stand XP's window grouping "feature" anyway, I soon got tired of the teeny windows in my taskbar since 75% of them were IE windows. I tried solutions that offered multitabs of IE, but was never satisfied with them. So, I tried out Mozilla after reading about it's 0.7 release on Slashdot.org (this was January 2001).
Well, this post is turning out much longer than intended so I'll pick it up a bit. </Diversion>
Mozilla did everything I wanted it to, but it was a resource hog, quite slow at starting up and switching tabs, and I didn't want to use its HTML composer or mail client (although I switched to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client several months ago). These things never kept me away from the browser as I was quite happy with it in general. Prevailing web standards over the years has also made browsing a pleasant experience once again. I eventually migrated to the lean, mean, browsing machine brother of Mozilla called Firebird, which is what I use to this day. Through the Mozilla browser architecture in the form of Firebird, I have the ability to:
- Multi-tab browse (native functionality)
- Do quick browser actions without the keyboard using mouse gestures (a favorite of mine)
- Block pop-up windows (intelligently lets you allow certain ones - native functionality)
- Block images from servers (native functionality - handles some ads)
- Hide images where the path contains key terms using AdBlock (blocks majority of ads)
- Stop flash content from running unless I click it (no more Flash ads!)
The last piece of the puzzle for me is Java ads. I cannot stand Java ads. Nothing ticks me off more than having to wait 10 seconds for a page to load because the JVM needs to load on my machine. Satan himself would shoot the designers of Java ads and the webmasters that use them except he doesn't want them living down the street from him either.