Comment RJ4C Re: About Time; The Web Is Nearly Unusable

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Advertisers admit causing uptick of ad blocking

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About Time; The Web Is Nearly Unusable (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-10-24 01:48 (#REVH)

It has gotten SO much worse over the last year or two. I spend much of my browsing time on mobile, which until recently had been somewhat of a refuge. Now it's MULTIPLE screen takeovers and autoplay videos with sound on mobile sites, and jiggles and refreshes and jerks as pages try to load, complete with additional takeovers that pop up after you've finally begun reading. Infuriating.

Turning off Javascript (selectively if you can run a Mozilla browser) and turning off images entirely seem like reliable old standbys that help save sanity. I appreciate decent page formatting but 93% of the time I just want to read the damned text.

As to the points above about ad blocking locally hosted ads, it's an arms race certainly. But sites need to track the ads in some way, and most of the time those conventions (naming or script related if not 3rd party hosted) will be discernible in the HTML or perhaps the content of the files or data passed by URL/cookie/etc. Determining the naming or retrieval scheme used by a given site shouldn't be harder than bypassing something like DVD encryption, at worst. It should be manageable at least in the near term.

Re: About Time; The Web Is Nearly Unusable (Score: 1)

by axsdenied@pipedot.org on 2015-10-24 04:52 (#RF2W)

You should install an ad blocker on your mobile. Plenty of choices for most of the platforms. No need to prevent loading images or to completely stop js.

Re: About Time; The Web Is Nearly Unusable (Score: 2, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-10-24 18:13 (#RGHK)

Actually, there were almost no options for mobile ad blocking a short while ago... Both Google and Apple forbid them from the application stores.

Firefox was the only one that held on to its ad blocking extensions, but is a dog on older phones. Now there's a handful of other options in the market, and those with rooted phones can install custom hosts files, but still not a lot of choices.

With Apple opening the floodgates, things may improve for ad blocking on both platforms.

Re: About Time; The Web Is Nearly Unusable (Score: 1)

by axsdenied@pipedot.org on 2015-10-25 11:27 (#RJ4C)

On android there were and there still are LOTS of options if your phone is rooted. I have been using adaway on android for a few years. It uses hosts file to blocks ads in browsers, apps etc.

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