AdBlock Plus

AdBlock Plus

• Never Paint Your House With a Flamethrower-

  Blocking Firefox is a Bad Idea

  A friend of mine forwarded me a link to WhyFireFoxIsBlocked.com (no, I won't link to them, because I won't feed this particular bit of link bait.) He asked: what are these people smoking? My initial response probably makes him wonder what I've been smoking!

  AdBlock Plus Is Not The Problem

  In a nutshell, at least one webmaster has (and perhaps others have) decided to try to block site visitors who are using Firefox, because of the existence of a popular extension called AdBlock Plus, which has the ability to allow one to visit web sites and never see any ads. I've been reading up on the issue, and it seems that Firefox-blocking webmasters' position is may be summarized as:
  • Firefox users with AdBlock installed are engaging in "theft" (their words, not mine) because they are visiting sites that depend on commercial advertising revenues to support the site, and
  • AdBlock developers have taken steps to circumvent webmaster attempts to detect and defeat AdBlock use by site visitors.
  (There are other, non-essential and even more inflammatory arguments made about some Firefox users and promoters, but I won't bother with them here because they have nothing to do with the matter at hand.)
• Surprise! Ad blocking may not be completely legal...- It appears that the ad blocking wars are heating up. There are massive fortunes at stake, and you are fooling yourself if you think that advertisers and ad network owners will just sit back and let it happen without making any effort to defend their markets and income.