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Ok, the war is on. Does anyone know of a good HTML5 ad blocker? Flash was awesome. It made it really easy to block animated ads. My browsing experience had bee
by abalone 13y ago
Ok, the war is on. Does anyone know of a good HTML5 ad blocker?
Flash was awesome. It made it really easy to block animated ads. My browsing experience had been wonderful ever since I installed a Flash blocker a few years ago. Also did wonders for my battery life.
Please, please help my browsing experience remain wonderful. Thanks.
- andybak 13y agoIt's going to be trickier as just blocking a single plugin is no longer viable. I think an domain blacklist a la Adblock is probably the best idea but that won't help you with ads that are already present in the DOM on pageload.
- McGlockenshire 13y agoThankfully, AdBlock and friends can also target DOM elements for hiding or outright elimination.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y ago...which they have gotten overly aggressive on; creating a myriad of issues with normal website functionality.
- aestra 13y agoI haven't found a significant example of this, and I've been browsing with Adblock Plus for years. The only place I've seen issues with is some video streaming sites, when it interferes with streaming ads.
- sequoia 13y agoCan you give an example? The only issue I've ever had with ABP et al. is when I'm working on a site and forget to turn it off & I think my site is broken (because ad doesn't load). :p
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoOne of our webdevs complained about some issue that was causing issues with our site in particular (regarding generic id names being blocked) and since then I've had several anecdotal instances where disabling adblock on sites seems to clear up nagging issues. I should have been more clear. My apologies.
- chid 13y agoWell it happens if you name your javascript ad*.js or similar, also should be extremely easy to find.
- est 13y agoWhy do we even waste time detectin and hiding ads? WHy can't we not wasting bandwidth download it at all?
- GhotiFish 13y agowell. You can't tell the server what to send, really.
- abalone 13y agoDoesn't Adblock Plus alter the structure of the page, which can mess up layout? Also believe it or not I don't want to block all ads, just animated ones. I want a general solution for All People, not just us nerds, and erasing advertising from the web would destroy a lot of businesses. I want something browser makers can build in and turn on by default, which is what Safari has essentially done now with Mavericks (Flash and Java are blocked by default.. Flash under the rubric of power conservation).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ljd 13y agoMaybe a crowd sourced blocker would be ideal for identifying divs in a site. It would be a plugin that allows you to mark a spot on a page that is an ad and the plugin will record the very specific CSS path and hide it permanently for you and others that go to visit that site. Maybe once you have a significant number of CSS paths you could do something with machine learning to identify the likeliness of a div containing an ad and block it when it crosses a certain degree of confidence.
- rfnslyr 13y agoI choose to disable adblock on all sites, and only block ads on websites I feel are not legit or are going overboard with the ads.
- madsushi 13y agoI choose to let sites do what they want with ads, since it is their site and their business plan/model. I also choose not to visit sites that have ads that I don't like.
- kybernetikos 13y agoThis is unrealistic. Most sites I visit by following links without knowing in advance what their ads are like.
- Goronmon 13y agoThis is unrealistic. Most sites I visit by following links without knowing in advance what their ads are like. Of course it's realistic. I've been doing it for years.
- pandalicious 13y agoThis is exactly what I do as well and it drives me nuts that it's not the default normal way that adblockers work. Do you also use a "@@*$document,domain=~foo.com|~bar.com" filter in order to accomplish it?
- lukeschlather 13y agoFirefox+NoScript does a pretty good job. Typically, the domains that host the JavaScript to run the ads have no JavaScript I actually want executed. If there's an exceptional case I open it in a Chromium private browsing window.
- abalone 13y agoNoScript blocks all javascript except for a whitelist you have to construct. That's way too disruptive as a general solution. We need something easy and automatic.
- yk 13y agoI am quite happy with Ghostery+NoScript. If you have a general solution, then you would just end up with an arms race. See [0] for details. [0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made-out-of-meat.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made...
- codereflection 13y agoIMHO - Ghostery should not be used, Disconnect should be used instead (https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/). Why? Because Ghostery is selling data to advertisers. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=ghostery&sortby=create_ts+desc https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=ghoste...
- fixanoid 13y agoHeres a more comprehensive article on the topic: http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023438 http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023438 Ghostery would only send data back to Evidon if GhostRank option is enabled.
- Semaphor 13y agoPlus Disconnect.me is FOSS and (at least when I switched) blocks more than Ghostery.
- radley 13y agoElement Hiding Helper lets you target page components based on source. It has a standard filter for ads and other filters for egregious social buttons/trackers. I also use it to remove annoying sign-up overlays and Google+ notifications when I search.
- dingdingdang 13y agoAnd if you add Stylish on top you can pretty much make webpages look like you want them to with 2m work - I often end up fixing huge ugly headers and the like (i.e. text size/color) on blogs I frequent!
- GrinningFool 13y agoTHis takes care of half of the problem - seeing the ads. It does not, unfortunately, prevent the ads from seeing you. (Very nearly literally these days.)
- mattdennewitz 13y agosuch entitlement! do you have any idea how publishers make money on the web?
- clebio 13y agoBy providing valuable, interesting content, maybe? http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes
- smokinjoe 13y agoThose are Facebook likes while the conversation is about ads on websites. And in the end, he says that interesting content will get you "Likes," where in the current conversation of blocking ads does the visitor contribute after perusing the valuable and interesting content?
- clebio 13y agoYes, I realize that, but the idea holds. Subscription-based services work if the content is worthwhile. It is an alternative model to ads, sure. One that is proven.
- smokinjoe 13y agoSubscription based services are an alternative, but then you really don't the the ease of redistribution to friends and stuff. Of course whatever floats your boat as long as there's some sort of compensation for the media one is ingesting. I don't really mind non-intrusive ads all that much.
- abalone 13y agoSorry, I wasn't clear enough.. I don't actually want to block all ads, just animated ads. Because they are annoying and drain battery life. I just want an HTML5 version of a Flash blocker.
- 13y ago
- diminoten 13y agoOr you could stop using a website you don't think does ads correctly.
- arthulia 13y agoI don't think that's completely fair. The people who are providing the content on a lot of web pages are not the same people who are responsible for the monetization scheme. Some sites have good/decent content, but really obtrusive advertisements that the authors aren't responsible for.
- debacle 13y agoThe people providing the content are still being supported by the monetization scheme - you're taking money from them when you use their content without viewing their ads.
- mike-cardwell 13y agoNo. Those people are exposing us to mass cross-site tracking before we even get to see their content, without our permission, and without most people even knowing it's happening.
- diminoten 13y agoVisiting a site is giving that site permission to run whatever it wants in your browser/on your computer. The only winning move is to not visit a site.
- malandrew 13y agoI'm curious whether or not an embedded Esprima AST parser would provide a decent API for writing rules that detect undesirable code and rewrites them as no-ops. It would be nice if this was also a social version of user scripts where I could visit all the user scripts that other users wrote that work on the page I am currently on. A button in the browser that takes me to all the user scripts that match the URL pattern for that page would be awesome.
- ebbv 13y agoSo, a website provides content to you without a membership free at the "cost" of also having ads on the page. Which you may or may not choose to ignore. Your response to this is circumventing the ads and blocking them, denying the service which you use any revenue from you. Awesome. How about if a site has intrusive over/under ads or otherwise intrusive behavior, you just don't visit it? And allow the sites you use that do ads without being jerks about it to actually continue to function and provide the service that you apparently value? EDIT: I'm not normally someone who crusades against ad blocking software, but your comment was extremely obnoxious and really annoyed me.
- Groxx 13y agoIf they're embedded iframes, you should still be able to use e.g. adblock based on the URL. If not, you can probably go back to element blocking, same as now for static containers. If they're invisible / removed from the DOM tree, it should be a lighter weight browsing experience :)
- barrkel 13y agoMy best suggestion is Adblock Plus combined with Element Hiding Helper in Firefox. Gives you a menu item that lets you select an element to hide, with a custom CSS selector. If you can find it with jQuery, you can probably hide it with that.