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Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

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21–30 of 218 posts

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#22
post #17

Ghostery, Disconnect, FlashBlock, AdBlock, and in some browser profile: NoScript & RequestPolicy. I whitelist trusted sites. The online ad ecosystem is out of control with surveillance: data collection, tracking, device fingerprinting, aggregation, de-anonymization, etc. (and data volumes). HTTP_DNT=1

Oh yeah... plus hosts file blocking of the most egregious servers and DNS blocking of the most egregious domains.

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#23
post #5

I use AdBlock and Ghostery. Ghostery is super useful. It throws out so much crap that I am not interested in. On sites like techcrunch, engadget or thenextweb it usually cuts the number of requests in half. Rant: It is sure getting out of hand in a big way: it is not uncommon for tech news sites to send you 1.5 MB of crap surrounding a simple 200 word story. I am getting so tired of that. Specially on mobile. My iPad…

1.5 * 10 = 15 MB, not 150 MB. So you can actually fetch 166 such pages unmodified.

Roughly how large is a TechCrunch page with Ghostery?

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#25
It has occurred to me before that those of us who use adblockers might prefer that they remain unpopular, because it's not clear who would win if the adblocker arms race really heated up. Might be that some of the "no" answerers are actually just concealing their true nature as adblocking zealots.

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#26
I used to. I'm not bothered by ads much anymore and I don't frequent sites with a lot of annoying ones. I guess I appreciate advertising more than I used to considering I use it personally, and I like to support the sites I love that rely on it.

I did start using Facebook Disconnect though.

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#28

Banner ads pay my salary, so out of professional courtesy, no. It's very easy to voluntarily blind yourself to ads. Plus, if I see something egregious on my employer's site, I can let them know. I use Ghostery to see who's buying data from whom.

Problem for me is not seeing ads, it's that they take too long to load and block the rest of the page. Perhaps strictly a browser problem, but until a better solution I just use vi /etc/hosts

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#29
Yep, but without a subscription to a blacklist. I only block things if they turn out to be too annoying. As it turns out, most of the things I've block aren't ads but are annoying images, javascript, and UI clutter.

Re: Poll: Do you use an adblocker?

#30
post #5

I use AdBlock and Ghostery. Ghostery is super useful. It throws out so much crap that I am not interested in. On sites like techcrunch, engadget or thenextweb it usually cuts the number of requests in half. Rant: It is sure getting out of hand in a big way: it is not uncommon for tech news sites to send you 1.5 MB of crap surrounding a simple 200 word story. I am getting so tired of that. Specially on mobile. My iPad…

Hey thanks for mentioning Ghostery -- I never heard of it before, and it looks neat. I'm using ABP, NoScript and FlashBlock myself, and I think Ghostery will make a nice addition to my line of defense.

(minor nitpick: it would take roughly 83 pages, not 10, to reach 50% of your 250MB limit)

[edit on my own math. heh]

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