How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general.

If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.)

This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product.

So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit.

Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason.

Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers.

So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website.

So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you?

It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it.

However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that).

I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).

(regardless of the test results; if they were negative then any other concerns are redundant)

Google is also adding more and more proprietary APIs to their browser, which Mozilla will not be able to implement (Chromecast, Google Earth, Hangouts) or is adding pseudo-webstandards, which have been publicly specified, but they did not push it through the standardization process to reach an agreement with other browser vendors (e.g. WebSQL, File Storage API).

You're also saying "plenty of browsers". There's hardly any browsers that don't use Trident/EdgeHTML, Gecko or KHTML/WebKit/Blink. If they use one of those, then there's the major browsers IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari/Chrome that webpage owners will test/build against and as a result also cause it to work on that fork, meaning that yeah, those forks can easily implement an ad blocker without much to fear.

But that's not the case, if you are such a major browser yourself. Then webpage owners will notice and will not have any reason to optimize against your browser engine anyways.

While I agree with your subjective experience -- right after buying product X I'm done, I wanna look at other stuff -- from a marketing/advertising perspective repeated ad exposures right after purchase actually do a lot to eliminate buyers remorse and reinforce our decision making. We're creatures of emotion first, logic second.

Seeing car ads after buying a car, unless it's the same model for less money, make you feel better about your purchase. I don't think that's why it happens online, but that's no small part of it in print and TV.

For example, "Optimizers" currently have to guess at what Google is doing, but if the system was open source, they would know exactly.

For another example, modern cryptography actually benefits from openness. Is there a similar possibility for Search?