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Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed
"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.
Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.
The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.
Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.
(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)
One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.
My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.
I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.
But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."
This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.
As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)
One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:
"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]
"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."
I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?
I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:
"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."
But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.
Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.
What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.
Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:
"This has been blown way out of proportion.
"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.
"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.
"Please don't jump to conclusions."
OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.
The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.
Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.
But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.
The article itself was good, but the thing most people will read is the title. "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed" is quite different from "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed?" for instance, or "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Disabled". Either of the last two seem more appropriate to the article, considering the article's contents.
So if someone is responding to the article, then yes, the article is a good one and examines a controversy that makes for an interesting read. The title, however, seems to contradict the majority of the research presented in the article, and could be the subject of complaints if it seems likely to mislead readers. Not a good thing.
Naked.
Visit Stileproject.com and then tell me it's a corporate web site.
That is really too much hassle. If you have multiple computers (or browsers), you have to put these lists on each computer (or browser). There are good lists of ad urls, how about making use of them?
I slapped squid together fairly easily (the config file is long, but after one sitting I had it working), and added ad zapper. With a little work and reading, I had a proxy that had 778 rules for allowing/rejecting images. As a side benefit, the caching is infinately better than Netscape's default cache. Far too often Netscape wanted to re-download entire static pages just when I hit back/forward.
I second the Naviscope recommend.
Best util I've ever found, it's only 600k, so check it out!
It's a power shift, no question. Though in the past it has been possible to block banner ads (Junkbusters has had a proxy server that blocks banner ads for years now) it has been enough of a pain that 99+% of people just aren't going to do it.
Add a menu option on the browser to do the same thing, and you've just made the blocking of banner ads much, MUCH easier for the end user, and lots of people will take advantage of it. I don't think anyone's going to argue against that.
The status quo has created a convenient space for marketers to lurk; they can position ads in such a way that you really have to have them visible in order to see the content you really want. What's key here is the (If you'll pardon the choir preaching on Slashdot...) practical lack of freedom of choice in the viewing of those ads. American society is so infested with advertising and marketing at the moment that the individual who doesn't want to see the pervasive marketing is having his or her freedoms whittled away day by day. It's gotten to the point where people used to the "freebies" provided by advertising question the very morality of providing a way to bypass ads.
It is not immoral to refuse to look at content you don't want to see.
Advertising is lauded as a way to make things free, but from a purely economic view, advertising as we see it today is wasteful in the extreme. Billions of dollars are spent every year to convince you that you need some new good in your life. 99.9% of the time this is pure consumerism hype; someone on the other end of the TV commercial, junk mail, or banner ad is trying to keep their economic niche alive by convincing you to budget money for their product or service that you were just as happy knowing nothing about.
The net result? You have to make more money to afford all the things you now "need". So you work harder, your productivity increases, the economy "grows" and politicians take credit for improving our lives. But is our standard of living really higher? Witness the infomercials that have to spend 15 minutes of a half hour slot trying desperately to convince you that your past advertising-driven purchases were all mistakes because this is the product you really need. There is a schizoprenia implicit to advertising that reveals its true nature.
With respect to banner ads and simple blocking, all that has happened is a power shift away from advertisers and towards end users. If end users are annoyed by ads, they can turn them off. If sites can't survive with users turning off those ads, the sites go down. There is no moral obligation to support that business model. If the cost of that business model is my freedom to choose what I look at, I say that cost is much, MUCH too high.
Add to your list; www.squidguard.org. Someone else mentioned it, and it looks good.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If this were to really happen you would run the risk of moving into an arms race between website designers trying to squeeze their banners past the checks (in order to gain ad-revenue) and the browser hackers trying to eliminate them. Now obviously there is little to stop individuals from patching browsers, proxies etc.. Themselves but really and truly is this not steeling from the web publishers?
See previous threads on this, it is obviously not stealing.
1. People pay for their internet connection, if anyone is stealing its the publishers stealing bandwidth from users and using it to make money for themselves.
2. They chose to make it their source of revenue, they can find other ways to do it.
3. Filtering spam isn't stealing, changing the channel during commercials isn't stealing, using a TiVo isn't stealing, not looking at a billboard isn't stealing, how is filtering banner ads?
4. Lynx views 0 graphics, do people who use lynx steal because they don't see the ads?
Your methodology is draconian. What you're suggesting is forcing people to pay for their internet connection and bandwidth to view these banner ads, taking time and money away from users to make the publishers money. This is fair, how?
-- iCEBaLM
Oh no! You mean this whole advertising-based economy could have to shift to making money some other way??? But there IS NO OTHER WAY! Oh my god it's the end of the world!!!!
[/sarcasm]
I would not lament at all if the giant advertising economy crumbled to the ground. Wasting time watching TV is bad enough, but now more than 50% of what you watch is commercials! There's something like 13 minutes of commercials in the average "half-hour" program, and then there's those infomercials. I have to pay for cable/satellite anyways (there are less local stations in San Jose that I can receive than there were in Visalia when I was 10!), and they use that money to bombard me with ads!
People, ads are EVIL. Some are cute and all in good fun, but the system in general is really fscked up! I am pretty resistant to the lies and general fluff found in ads, ("You need this prescription drug. We won't tell you what it does, so ask your doctor about it. Get medicated with InActiviara and be a happy person. Side effects are mild and include vomiting, montezuma's revenge, priapism, and menstrual cramps.") but I am not resistant to my kids begging and pleading and they are not resistant to advertising.
In a perfect world, the internet would let us get past ads. Instead of being constantly being bombarded by ads everywhere I look (highway 101 anyone?), if I was in the mood to buy something I would look it up. Instead of shooting random ads at me, ad money would be spent answering my questions by a real person (or suitable bot) when I come investigating for myself. Products would be sold based on their quality and warranties, not on the fact that their commercial has burping frogs.
...and before anyone says something about "but that would disrupt such and such a system", I DON'T CARE! Humans have rights (and animals too). Corporations/Economic systems do NOT.
That comparison to TV/radio does not work.
The content providers on TV for instance are paid to run the ad whether *you* watch the ads or not. Therefore, they lose no money if *you* turn away from the TV during commercials.
It is different on the web. Content providers are typically paid per impression (i.e., the more downloads of a company's banner, the more the content provider gets paid).
By not downloading the banners, and yet still consuming the content provider's content, you *are* stealing from them - i.e., you get their content without them getting paid for it.
It may not be illegal as such, but it is certainly immoral.
I understand and share the concerns about privacy issues. I also don't like pop-ups. But are there not better solutions to this than completely blocking the ability of content providers to support themselves?
Remember, There Ain't NO Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
-Geon
I would like to see options for analysing a page, starting with a link dump mode like Lynx, and dear old IBM WebExplorer's links menu, so for the case of the missing Submit button, I could find out what's going on. This would not be useful without there also being a domain-equivalence table (e.g. hotmail.com == passport.com == freebsd.org and similar; maybe some regexps would be handy, since most modern machines wouldn't notice the extra overhead).
A similar mapping to geld the scripting on specific pages or sites, and/or to disable for all but re-enable for specific would also be good.
Putting these in a separate config section, disabled by default and emblazoned with suitable warnings (perhaps even rcfile-style completely eliminable for tur[n]key intallations) would help to ally the fears of the "it causes problems" panic merchants. Mozilla, if it is to succeed, will want to be more like Lego than any other browser, that is, more possibilities available but not forced on you.
The idea of banner ads going away is difficult to envision. Advertisers are finding more ways to assault your eyeballs, not less. For example, if *.doubleclick.com becomes widely blocked, an advertising site (www.randomwebsite.com) need only add an A-record to their DNS (for something like dc.randomwebsite.com) that resolves to an IP owned by doubleclick.com. If doubleclick then diversifies their IP address holdings, this will become increasingly difficult to block.
Although doubleclick seem to me to be slowly improving the quality of their ads, I do find them extremely tiresome and would treasure an easy way to replace them with a fast blank box.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Please inform me as to what needs to be done to the JS Prefs to re-enable the offsite image blocking.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Please, can we keep this forum on the following topics:
- Netscape is evil incorporated.
- AOL is even more evil and capable of burning millions of CD-shaped coasters.
- Time-Warner is crazy.
- Mozilla will save the universe.
Try not to stray from these official Slashdot opinions. Sure people with emails containing "@aol.com" or "@netscape.com" may say it's still in the source code, and it may be accessible by setting it in the javascript file, heck, it might even be in the source code (like anyone looks at it), but please, for the purpose of this discussion area, consider it completely removed because AOL/Netscape/TW are paid by advertisers to ensure we users do not avoid their advertisements.
After following these guidelines, only then may we have a coherent, rant-filled discussion forum on this topic.
Thank you.
When i first discovered B.S., i became an immediate fan because the style of humor struck a chord with me. Then i became more of a fan when i saw the quality Perl work, and then the quality Photoshop work. Now i think i'm ready to propose marriage.
:)
It's nice to see you're not a hypocrite regarding your Metallica feature. And i completely understand the last part of your post - i've put out a lot of humor in various mediums (1 2 3) and it's often taken quite a bit of my time and effort to do so. But even though i can't name any benefit i get from it, i just feel i have to. I mean, once an idea comes to me, it's like an obligation to develop and release it.
It's the exact same reason people work on Open Source - while the Cathedral and the Bazaar suggested reasons like peer admiration and utility, i think my feeling of duty is the real reason. That "labor of love" feeling produces the purest kind of art, be it humor or code or music.
One last point of irony - when i go to Brunching on a weekday and see no new feature, i feel robbed, as in, "Hey! I downloaded a banner ad and i didn't get any content in return!"
Uh, on that note, everyone should click the link in my sig, sign up, and make me some money.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Well, it was either a guy, or she has a deep voice. <shrug>
"... message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an excercise in computer science masturbation."
4 big things I can't tolerate about (some) ads: 1. When they disable caching of the ad itself, or even, in some cases the ad and the page it is on. Going back to such a back with the back button and having it stay blank until it is done reloading the same exact content (with perhaps a different ad) is very annoying. It is even worse when I am using Netscape under NT and they disable the caching so throughly that if I use off-line mode it gives an error and fails to return to the page at all. Just think of the bandwidth waste caused by uncachable content. Slashdot seems to have this issue btw. 2. When the banner ad causes the page to stay blank until it is done loading. 3. Annoying animation. 4. When they crash the browser.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Instead of not downloading the banner, one could instead download it at low priority. This slower download is accomplished by calling setsockopt to set the TCP receive buffer size (SO_RCVBUF) to something small (2k or so). This keeps the transfer rate of the socket low, leaving bandwidth to download the rest of the page first.
I explored this in a research paper (postscript) I helped write. Here we ran netscape against a background ftp transfer -- crippling the ftp using essentially setsockopt, to make the web transfer happen faster.
If anybody with the skill to implement this is reading this, shrinking the receive buffer is the safe, effective way to make banner ads less annoying. The first packets containing the image header are likely to be downloaded soon, so that page rendering can proceed as designed. The ads (and important buttons) still get displayed, but our experience isn't consistently slowed by them.
Reducing the transfer rate of the foreign images is the answer, not omitting them.
Jeremy
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Blocking sites that suck would simplify the design of the browser somewhat. No need for a render engine, obviously, if you're never going to visit any Web sites. :-)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The bug report states that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that the feature was only removed from the menu, not from the code, and that it was done pending code cleanup.
The report also has something to say about news sites carrying the story without confirming that facts...
So, this is here, why?
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
I don't particularly mind, because I know I can always proxy banner sites into oblivion. However, It was much easier to build an effective blocking list by simply right-clicking on every banner ad on the web. Within a few minutes, you could have an advertisement-free web experience. Now I have to edit some proxy config files.
The other reason I don't mind is that the source to Mozilla is open. This feature can be added (or apparently, #defined into existence) by whomever, whenever.
-jwb
But I also disagree with anybody who suggests that it makes sense to filter out ads. Thanks to advertising revenue, I don't have to pay anybody to use countless great sites that never would have gotten to be as good as they are without ad revenue.
Why do advertisers pay to appear on these sites? Because they know they'll get the page views, which will bring the click-thrus, which will bring them sales and revenue. If they see those numbers going down the business case is gone, so are the ads, and so is the content the ads pay for.
Suck it up. Boycott sites that have advertising if you're so friggin' put off by it. Or do what I do: Ignore the stupid things for the most part (they're not all that intrusive). And who knows? Like me, you might just occasionally see an ad for something that interests you.
They should get rid of it, instead of just removing it from the menu. While there could probably be legitimate uses, it is obviously intended to block advertising. This is not right. Some content on the internet is free, but some content you must pay for. Viewing advertisements it paying with your time. If you can block out advertisements, you are no longer paying. You are essentially stealing. Obviously this isn't going to be a problem if a few people do it, but if it becomes a major feature in a lot of browsers, it's going to get pretty annoying. They'll have to find new ways to make us pay for content, and they might be less benign than banner ads.
Did slashdot try to talk to the mozilla.org people? Doesn't seem like it. I didn't get email and no one else reports having gotten any either.
there was a time when i turned of images, so pages would load faster, too. it was useful at the time. very nice. but now... i haven't used that feature in years. i'm not even sure if it still exists. heh. (okay, i use lynx fairly regularly still, but that's a different story.)
turning off images to foreign sites would be really handy in a couple of instances... for example, in mid-afternoon the IGN network's adserver inevitably gets bogged down (try http://pc.ign.com/) and this makes it seem like the page is still loading. hitting "stop" causes the page to appear, sans ad banner. good. having a browser that could do this automatically if i chose would be a Good Thing.
i'd like to see it.
Wait until it is released and then declare it a failure (or more likely a success).
I'd love to have this feature on a browser. Is there any chance that someone else could re-implement it? This is an open-source project, right?
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
A webpage is an entity - a presentation of images and textual content usually part of an intended design. It's kind of arrogant to filter any of it really, and noone force me to actually study a banner even if it's there. I see commercials as part of "life on the web" and in effect contemporary art as well as a consumers thermometer. A browser should focus on presenting ALL content as fast and correct as it can, and leave censorship to 3rd hand applications and personal taste and need. If what you *really* need every now and then is quick browsing due to low bandwidth, the tiny banners aren't the bottleneck - and there's always the option to turn off all images from loading.
What's this angst for commercials? I submit myself to all kinds of impressions daily - contradicting at large - that's partly the basis for making up my mind about any subject - if an opinion is called for at all. That's LIFE.
I vote for the smallest footprint browser with the best browsing abilities. Those who wish to live in some kind of purist dreamworld can always use any of the plethora of filters available. I really don't need feature overkills - i'm quite happy facing facts and the web as it was created.
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.
...and don't REMOVE the ISP shortcut from your
windoze desktop! That helped subsidize the cost
of your modem|game|software. Someone worked long
and hard to write the code to put it there!
It's immoral to remove, blah, blah...
Seriously though - Mozilla should do one better
with site-by-site preference tweaks like:
doubleclick.com: never_load
or
doubleclick.com: redirect=onepixel.gif
slashdot.org: load_all_images accept_all_cookies
shop.site: load_local_images accept_local_cookies
geocities.com: no_crappy_popup_windows
justtext.com: load_no_images
*: load_local_images accept_no_cookies disable_java
This would probably be too complicated for Joe
average, but is exactly what I would use.
This type of thing is ridiculous. Don't worry about it, its not that big of an issue! Yes, I would use Image Filtering, but its not going to break my heart if it isn't there. And, on the side of "Its stealing", the people that would use this type of technology are the people that do not even pay attention to banner ad's in the first place, more than likely. Ask yourself: "When was the last time I actually clicked on a banner ad"?
Jay
"What's this script do? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep Hint for the answer: not everyth
I think this is a non-issue. The reason I say this is simple:
If I am a banner-ad company, I can find new ways to get the ad to your browser. I can have my clients run small proxies on their web-servers, I can change the size of my ad, I can do anything I really would like to do.
My point is that this feature is nice, and I would like to see it, but it merely makes showing ads more inconvenient. There are quite a few companies that are running their own ad campaigns, and are serving the images up from their own servers, so this wouldn't eliminate those ads. Not only that, but if you start getting too image-blocking happy, you end up with the web as it was 5 years ago ($shudder$).
I have some problems with the web as it is today, but would I want to take a step back that far?? No thank you.
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
Proxomitron is in fact exclusively for windows. Open mouth, remove foot. There you go.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
makes them point to the nonexistent machine next to you. Alternatively, if you've got a real machine that wasn't already running a web server, you can point it there, especially if you've got a handy 404-returner application to make it fail faster (or to return a blank dummy banner.) Or you can point it to a Class E IP address or a nonexistent machine on your LAN.
If you're running Windows, you'll need to find a way to convince the OS to check your C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS file before checking DNS - or get your DNS admininstrator to help you (or find a DNS server for Windows and run it on 127.0.0.1.)
Another simple method for Windows, if you're inside a corporate firewall and use an explicit proxy server (as opposed to auto-proxy or a transparent proxy) is to list the annoying banner domains in the "Don't Proxy" box in Netscape along with your corporate network. That way it tries to reach annoying-banner.com directly and gets blocked by the firewall instead of proxied. It's not quite as fast as not looking for the banner at all, but usually as fast as or faster than actually retrieving it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
> mozilla.org != Netscape.
Well, sure. This is exactly why the allegations that Netscape management pressured mozilla.org into concealing a useful feature of their software are disturbing.
Websites get revenue from advertising -- and any decent site gets a CPM revenue model, which means the website gets paid a flat fee per one thousand banner *impressions*. Clickthroughs mean nothing.
Any website that is getting paid per-click is getting ripped off because advertisers know that nobody clicks on banners anymore.
If you block the ads, you are denying the website revenue. The advertiser doesn't care, because if you block the ad they don't have to pay the website. But the website still has to server its content to you, but this time for free.
All of you people out there who think you are sticking it to the nasty advertisers have got it wrong. You are sticking it to the websites that are trying to provide you interesting content at no charge. Running a webserver is not free. Without some sort of revenue to support the costs of running the site, the site will go away.
The analogy of muting TV commercials is invalid. The revenue model is different. Advertisers pay TV networks based on how many people watch the show. They don't pay based on how many people watch the commercial. Whether you watch the commercial or not, the network still gets the revenue it needs to pay the costs of creating and delivering the programming.
I run a website. I don't care if you click on the banners. I don't care if you look at the banners. But please, download the banners. It's the only way I get paid.
Doubleclick was always the one that annoyed me. They seem to be on 90% of the web sites anyhow and I wouldn't trust that 'opt out' option anymore than Microsoft documentation....
I just got rid of them by adding a line in the hosts file so that doubleclick.net points to 127.0.0.1 and then you just get a pretty broken link on all your pages. Far better, IMO than wating for some silly add to load and keep marketing data on you...
There isn't a conspiracy here except in the minds of those ignorant news organisations (including slashdot) who have whipped this thing into a frenzy of accusations without even bothering to check the facts for themselves.
If I could moderate articles, Jamie would be in karma heaven.
(Then again I'd like to give Katz a *plus* one-Troll :-)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
are you gonna come and sue me? Did I miss the click agreement that specified that I couldn't view certain parts of your page without viewing others?
I didn't say it was illegal to block certain parts of the site, my commentary was more directed at the fact that someone had the nerve to say that ads are somehow stealing from him as a user (I do think the newer Shockwave and other heavy-media based ads are stretching it a bit).
If you wish to install blocking software to block off ads, more power to you. If an inconspicuous and tiny graphic bothers you that much, by all means, block it. You're probably the same type of person that's downloaded hundreds of commercial songs via Napster, and thinks that's perfectly fine. (This isn't directed at the post I'm replying to, just in general)
Realize, however, that when your practice of screwing money out of the webmaster becomes wide-spread, that content you were so desperate to see uninterrupted by ads might just disappear completely. I run ads to pay for the server I run my site on. Yes, they do pull in a little bit more than the cost of the server, but I'm not getting rich off them by any stretch of the imagination, especially compared with the time I put into my site. By blocking the ads, you're taking money out of my pocket.
No, there's no click agreement, and you're not legally bound to view them, but you should be morally bound to at least tolerate them.
NO CARRIER
Here Here. I agree totally. As much as I hate the ads they are a fact of life. If you don't want ads on tv you get pay tv. It's simple!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Wonder if someone could write something like this via a plug in?
If you are using win32, then check out Naviscope... It works quite well at blocking pop-up windows and images (ads). It runs as a proxy on your local machine...
Search for it on TuCows.
Yes, but Netscape's parent, AOL, makes relatively more money from service fees than from ads. This feature puts them at a competative advantage to pure-Internet sites which derive a greater fraction of their revenue from ads.
It might be a bit cynical for me to say it, but it is easier to claim that AOL would want to promote this feature than to have it removed.
- The ad-owners will pay me for their consumption of my bandwidth. I have to pay every second from my phone bill, no free local calls...
- The ad-owners will prompt me if I want to see their offer. The ads are stupid when they come unwanted and draw away my attention (and money, too!)
It's simple to put an animated GIF on page when you know the other side of line will pay it...--- Naive inside, foolish outside...:)
Maybe it is, but it doesn't have to be. I haven't signed any agreements to look at specific content on the Web.
Yep. Note what these sites have in common: a revenue stream not dependent on advertising. Whether the funding is coming from the owner's pocket (hobby sites), an organizational budget (charity sites) or from profits generated from the site's content or product (pay and retail sites), there's no need for advertising.
The Web is not television, nor is it print. The advertising methods that work in those media cannot work on the Web, at least not indefinitely. As others on this thread have observed, there are already products that block images; we're just waiting for the one "killer app" implementation that will catch on with the average surfer.
When that happens, sites that rely on banner ads will have to change their revenue model or die.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
I fond that this featrure is quite useful. It does not seam to block all adds, but it does seam to block ones that lag the whole pages download speed. Even though this is a great feature having it so easy to block out adds seams to me like something that could hurt the web in the long run. The people who are complaining that it takes up their desktop space I think are just silly it (it seams to me that I still have the space from the add used up).
If evverybody had a feature like this it woluld not be useful because companies would find ways around it, and it would become useful. On the otherhand if it is left as a hidden preference (in my opinion what should be done with it) it allows people who have more sense then a patato bug to turn it on, while people who don't are none the wiser.
--Hope I make sense
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
if (browser.allow_off_site_graphics)
{
document.write('Our site uses off-site graphics, which your browser does not support');
document.write('To turn on off-site graphics do: yada, yada, yada');
}
The result: Big sites with valuable content (Yahoo, online newspapers, slashdot taken over by the dark side) would still get ad money, whereas smaller sites and sites where you can choose an alternative with the same content (startups, slashdot as today etc) would not.
Webmasters can use countermeasures too, you know...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
If an inconspicuous and tiny graphic bothers you that much, by all means, block it.
To be totally honest, something that flashes, in multiple colors, repeatedly, at POKEMON CLASS EPILEPSY INDUCING SPEEDS, the word 'Winner' or something that is a Java applet...
THESE ARE NOT INCONSPICUOUS OR TINY. These are good solid reasons that I have, in my IE preferences, doubleclick and a few other banner-ad providers in the 'Custom' zone, with 'No Java', 'no images' and 'no cookies' kicked in.
If I could find a place that didn't use irritating banner ads (I want to punch the maker of 'Punch the Monkey'), tracking via cookies, and just gave ads that people could click through or not, I'd be rather happier and willing to put a banner ad on my site.
----
Brazil has decided you're cute.
There are many websites out there with overlapping functionality. If you don't like the banners on one site then move to another one that has less banners!
:) ).
My website (Dear Diary) isn't paid for by banners but they do help contribute. Initially we had banners on every page but due to customer comments we agreed to cut the number of banners down to a minimum set and everyone was a lot happier - ok so we arent making as much but the banners now only appear if you are logged in and making use of the site to store your diary, if you are reading (which is 75-90% of the site) then you will never see a banner. Our users are a lot happier about this, our hit rate has gone up and our income after a couple of months is pretty much back to where it was (piddlingly small, but still
I don't mind seeing banners - yes there are a few (such as Treeloots bloody monkey) that really annoy me, and if a user complains about a particular advert for any reason then I go into the Ad configuration and switch it off.
The solution to this problem is not blanket banning ad banners, if they didn't exist then I would probably not have started this, our server costs a fortune to run, the solution is communication (shock! horror!). For example, I think the adverts on Slashdot are generally great, they aren't too intrusive and I do click on them occasionally when there's something that interests me (indeed, my server hosting came from a Slashdot Banner!).
Conspiracy or not, Like it or not, if you ban advert banners in the browser, in my humble opinion you will see some sites shut down (and/or not be maintained as often) and some sites will start having subscription fee's to make their money. One person commented that making the contract visible might be a solution - that might well be a third track, when you sign up you agree to accept ad banners, if you are the only site with this contract then you aren't going to succeed but if some sites shut down, some sites start charging, a few remain free but under developed, and the rest have this Terms and Conditions thing - Ad Banners then start looking a little more attractive, I know if I had to pay for some of the sites I use directly, I wouldn't use them (i'd be paying for far too many for one thing, it'd cost a blinkin fortune!).
Unless of course, the only free websites that you want to see are the ones run exclusively by big corporations (because they can afford to throw the money away)? No more small upstarts challenging the big boys? Something sounds a bit counter-intuitive here.
==== Dear Diary ==========
==== Dear Diary ==========
http://www.deardiary.net - Put your thoughts online, Visit my diary, http://neutronic.d
I still can see his page in Lynx...where's that magic "no ads, no page" site?
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
I hate banner ads as much as the next guy. Sometimes, what I want is out of sync with how it's funded. Tough. I would also like no ads on tv, no big ugly posters on huge boards by the roadside, etc. etc. That's tough too - the world isn't like that.
All out-of-site link blockers will achieve is to make the web advertisers change their, er, 'technology' slightly. In the end, who gains from that? Chances are the new methods will be more insidious, and much harder to avoid. The last thing the web needs is an advertising arms race.
If offsite images are blocked, all advertisers have to do is have the images come from the main site. It's easy to have a server-based script fetch the image, and return it to the browser. All that does is burn CPU on the content site, slowing its response time for everyone. Even worse, the advertising could come in great big ugly Shockwave format. Worse still, it could be embedded in the site graphics, in turn part of the user interface so you can't use the site wthout it. That just clutters the UI, to say nothing of further excluding Lynx users.
Often the people who put up banner ads do their sites for free, and if they want to make a little money from that, perhaps to pay for the web hosting, that's their choice. Trying to stop it with this primitive technique achieves very little IMO.
BTW I'm appalled by the number of 'why is this here' and 'the article poster is a fool' messages on this topic. I thought it was a good post, and it's nice to get a little more than the usual paragraph-and-link.
- "it is obviously not stealing." - Get your facts strait.
No way! Paying for your internet connection just pays your ISP, it does not pay for the content on the internet. The content provider you are viewing also pays bandwidth costs.
Instead, think of it as a premium rate phone number, you are paying for the ADDITIONAL content by downloading the ad-banner. If companies started adding buttons to telephones that caused a premium rate call to be charged at normal rates you would soon see the premium rate numbers disapear.
I agree Filtering spam is not stealing, you have not asked for anything, you get nothing out of it in return. Changing the channel during commercials is not stealing, the commercials have not gone away, the Tv company is still paid for runnign them and the program you are watching still gets financed.
Most Banner advertising gets sold on a CPM basis, if you don't download the banner then the website doesn't get paid.
I admit lynx is an interesting case in point, however lynx does not hide the fact it is a text only browser. The key point here is that lynx does not avoid displaying ad-banners, it just can't. The difference here is that an option like this in mozila is diliberately avoiding the banners.
When you pay for your internet conenction you are paying for a connection, not the content. Thats the fundamental basis of the internet, if you remove the capability for content providers to make money you remove once chunk of the web, you will just be left with hobby sites, pay sites, charity sites and online stores.
My methodology is not draconian, I find banners as anoying as the next man, I am however a realist, content that is payed for by banners would not be here if it were not for the banners. Frankly I find your argument hipocritical that you post such an opinun on a website that IS PAYED FOR BY BANNERS.
Right on. This is totally inline with a theory that I have: The advertising industry is totally self-serving. Just think about it. What if we did not have the advertising industry (we would still have ads...just not companies devoted to producing them)? The only negative consequence I could see is that the Super Bowl would be less entertaining. That's it. On the plus side, products would be cheaper. The ads that did exists, while not being as entertaining, would probably be much more useful, as far as letting consumers know what products are available. The only reason businesses pay advertising agencies is because they have to in order to compete.
Parents, don't let your kids go into advertising!
Yes, at the point they're now, Mozilla probably can no longer afford to keep the feature off permanently. But expect also that in the future, developers will need to get management's approval before including any controversial features in a milestone, or before discussing them "publically". Yes, Mozilla is an open project, and these goals will be hard to achieve, but rest assured, AOL-TimeWarner will come up with something...
Try reading the end of one of the stories under "pay by viewing banner ads" with Lynx, or with ads turned off.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Is there any reason why the browser can't have an addition that checks incoming pages as they are rendered and modifies them? Then you could download filters or write your own in like Javascript that'd block unwanted ads, links to known porn sites, or whatever concerns you. Since the DOM is completely exposed this should be fairly flexible right? Could use pattern matching, reg expr's, whatever..
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
In 98, you add all sorts of banner sites to hosts.sam(or is it just hosts?), add "geocities.com" mapping to 127.0.0.1 and a few other free-page providers to disable javascript, and most of the banner ads are gone.
If IE insists on not showing the page from the one DNS error the ad banner gets, upgrade to IE5.
Rich
In other words don't get too worked up about. Be glad the feature is there for people motivated enough to enable it and let the other %99.5 keep generating the hits that keep your favourite websites up.
I *really* don't think that 1/2 hour of TV has 13 minutes of commercial! That's exagerating quite a bit. Maybe 8.
IIRC, if I scan past the ads, a 1-hour show takes about 48 minutes to watch.
BTW: Right now, I have iCab not loading any images and asking me when I want to accept cookies. When It encounters cookies, it asks if I want to accept it, accept it but expire at the end of the session, or NEVER ACCEPT cookies from this domain EVER again. That last option is sweet!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
>By blocking the ads, you're taking money out of my pocket.
And by not sending me 1 million dollars you're taking money out of my pocket.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Not only do I wish to block ads, I would also like to have an option to simulate a click on the ad, and ignore the results. So I could simulate interest in (say) slashdots ads, and possibly provide them with some revenue, without having to look at the junk...
In Murphy We Turst
Well, they do. And they still invest heavily on TV ads.
Why? Because they are counting on the people that are even too lazy to change channels.
Abreu
------
> Remember when people used to SEE the Superbowl and go to the bathroom on the halftime, instead of doing the opposite? >
No sig for the moment.
Rich
Couldn't you just use URL rewriting on appache to make the banner add URL appear to come from the same server? They have the URL rewriting turn it into the real URL, or did the feature take that in account?
>I have yet to figure out how to enable them for sites like Slashdot
/. ;)
you can do this easily - edit the sblock.ini file...
# The ~ character in column one stops blocking if a previous pattern matched.
# The last match wins, so these exceptions are usually placed at the end.
# ~mycompany.com
so add
~betaimages.slashdot.org
~adfu.blockstackers.com
and anything else that appears to get blocked if you really want to see ads on
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Let's be a little selfish for a while, OK? I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it, the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a)some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b)less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.
In essence, this is a dilemma: I don't want to see the ads, but I want others to see them so that the system will work. This is why I want Mozilla (or at any rate Netscape 6) not to include a junkbuster feature, whereas I am capable of (i)patching the sources to add such a feature myself, or (ii)more simply, set up my /etc/hosts file to redirect some hosts like ad.doubleclick.net back to 127.0.0.1 (this is what I do: while it isn't as selective, it is still nice because it works with every browser and at the same time is not as complicated as using a proxy).
This is definitely selfish of me, but who cares? Seeing ads is not the end of the world. The use of the /etc/hosts file is well documented, as is the C++ programming language: it's not like the method were kept secret and undocumented. I just don't want to see 10^8 newbies getting rid of ads on the Web.
mozilla.org != Netscape. If Netscape decide to remove this feature completely in Netscape 6, or not provide a UI for it, that's their business. It has nothing to do with mozilla.org.
mozilla.org produces software for developers, not end users (most of the time). Netscape will produce the first end-user browser based on Mozilla - and how much Mozilla tech is in it is completely up to them.
Gerv
Hi. :). It's one of choices :). See here :). It's now almost dead, I had not time to improve it for a year :S.
My junkbuster-like proxy does this
And lastly, what's with the hostility towards America Online? May I please remind you that this so-called "totalitarian corporation" is largely funding this project?
Which is precisely why I'll be supporting KDEs web-browsing efforts, thankyouverymuch.
Not that I think that there's anything wrong in blocking them anyway. There's noting in the HTTP protocol that says that when you retrieve a piece of HTML, you are honour bound to retrieve any in-line content contained within it.
Rich
Banner ads are the next BLINK tag. I find them highly irritating, distracting, and very very few of them are even close to interesting.
I'm sure I'm not alone on this, but I want a web browser that allows me to:
The only item above I can control is the last. I rely on tinyproxy (and a patch) to do my banner ad filtering. One thing the web and application developers can't control is the actual net link -- intermediate software (such as Junkbusters) will remain effective. That is, until "management" decides to remove proxy access from the browser.
(As a filtering example, a visit to www.salon.com caused a total of 25 HTTP requests. With ad filtering, the number of requests dropped to 12 and the page loaded much faster.)
Ad servers are not powerful enough to deliver the ads without delay. Many sites that use ad servers are sluggish, and it's due simply to the ad servers. Since many web sites don't receive payment unless a visitor actually clicks on the ad, my filtering of otherwise uninteresting ads isn't denying them income. And it speeds up my browsing while decreasing the annoyance factor.
I browse for content. I want it quick, and I want it without being nagged to Punch the Monkey!
Will blocking the images really work? All the ad mobs will do is change the way the ads are delivered, moving the delivery from an off-site to the local site through a script or something similar.
The blocking would work for a few months and then slowly it wouldnt work on some sites...
Good idea, one step behind...
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
I ran directly into this when I was developing a REGEXP-based URL filter. My first pass at filtering blocked akamai.net, but then I learned what it was and how to more selectively block ads from within akamai.
REGEXP-based filtering is a powerful feature, and any pattern specified sloppily can "nuke" any site, not just Akamai. Can (l)users handle this power? In general, for a product like Mozilla I don't think so. But for those of us who can, external proxies are still most effective.
The image blocking feature also blocks many non ad images - it doesn't discriminate. On my site for example I serve the 'Valid HTML4' images from a different domain hosted on the same box, but Mozilla can't tell that and blocks them.
If the feature disappears for good, then get involved with the code, dig back through CVS and work out how to put it back in...
If you are serious about blocking ads, run a proxy, a filter or one of the other ways to specifically target ads...
agreed, except that, I don't think products would be cheaper. Pay would be adjusted accordingly, so it would be a zero-sum game, as far as overall standard of living goes.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I never thought I'd see this in an article on slashdot.
I thought the whole point of having the slashdot.org domain was that it read as http:///..org not http://www./..org?
am I missing the point here?
-- johnmc.
When you pay for your internet conenction you are paying for a connection, not the content. Thats the fundamental basis of the internet, if you remove the capability for content providers to make money you remove once chunk of the web, you will just be left with hobby sites, pay sites, charity sites and online stores.
Good, I like that, we all seem to forget slashdot was, and arguably better when it was, a hobby site. If the larger content providers go down because they base their business on such an easily foiled revenue stream then THEY DON'T DESERVE TO BE IN BUSINESS. I pay for my bandwidth, I choose what I do with my bandwidth, if I don't want ads, and I don't want spam in my inbox, and if I don't want to see slashdot posts from the user "JamesSharmon" then I will damn well filter them out at my lesiure, and not you, or anyone else, is going to tell me I'm stealing because of it.
-- iCEBaLM
Very good point about the title : I wrote myself a little script which culls the headlines off /. every fifteen minutes and sends new ones to my cell phone using SMS (I'm in Belgium, and I use Proximus - if you're interested in the script drop me a note). I've only been running the script for about two or three weeks now, and sometimes I really have wondered what an article would be about because the headline was so cryptic. In this case the headline might have been a tad too sensationalist to cover the well-researched article.
;-)
OT : Sometimes I also got the same headline twice, because someone made a little change to spelling or punctuation. So some people's spelling flames really help
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
But I won't. Why? Because if a trend like this continues, then banner ad propreitors will cease to offer money in exchange for advertising space. What will come of this then? The websites from which you read and (hopefully) appreciate content will discontinue their operations. They will have no source of revenue.
Banner ads may be annoying, they may take up your small amount of bandwidth, they may cause a page to load slower, whatever. But those ads are why you go to whatever websites you are visiting. Without them, there would be no /. and there would be no free internet.
In fact, I'll take the chance and loose whatever moderator points a may have gained from the above words. Without banner ads, there would be no internet as we see it today. There would be no reason for cheap internet access if every site was a pay login site, and if everything was pay as you go. Those ads let the internet prosper.
People will disagree with me, but I hope that I have let others see what I think.
I dont have a
I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it,
Out of curiosity, what makes your eyeballs so much better than theirs? Why should others 'pay' for your web browsing?
the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a) some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b) less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.
I hate to break it to you, but banner ads aren't working as it is. The reason they have to base advertising costs on page views is because clickthrough rates (the amount of people who actually click on a banner to see where it leads) decline by about 50% a year.
And it's the advertiser's own fault, really. Even with a theoretical clickthrough rate of 0.25% as of the end of 1999 (the article I cited above states the clickthrough rate is 0.5% at the end of 1998) how many of these are translated into actual sales? The problem is that once they get that clickthrough, they fail to deliver the goods. If I click on a banner that says "BUY QUAKE III NOW AND SAVE 20%!" I want to click on that link, enter my name and address and billing info that will get me Quake III. I don't want to get directed to the front page of http://www.coolnetgames.com/ and have to go hunting for it myself.
As others have said, when we make the transition to an advertising-based economy, you can expect products and services to go right down the tubes. (Hey, welcome to prime-time television! Has anyone else noticed that they squeeze ads in every place they can anymore, like during the end credit sequence of their shows?) Why should they care if I buy or not when they're making more money selling my eyeballs to other advertisers?
I would much prefer advertisers to put their money into something that is useful to them as well as to me -- that way, they will continue to pour their money into the internet, I'll find products I wish to purchase, and we will both get something of value. Because as it stands, this bubble is going to burst (whether or not Mozilla has image-blocking features) and the costs of your connection and other services are going to go up anyway.
Jay (=
"It may not be illegal as such, but it is certainly immoral."
If I use someone else's password to access proprietary content on a subscription-based site, that's stealing.
If the CEO of a corporation lays off a thousand employees and is rewarded with a large bonus, that's immoral.
To suggest that I not waste my time, our mutual bandwidth, or your server's CPU time to download an ad that I'm not going to pay attention to anyway, is NOT immoral.
If the counter-argument is that you (as a hypothetical publisher) get paid for the ad impression whether I pay attention to it or not, THAT is arguably immoral, since it implies that you are knowingly defrauding the advertiser. But the reality is that ad banners typically generate revenues for click-thoughs, not simple impressions. If I'm not going to click through to the advertiser's site, then making me download the ad is a waste of my time.
There is no social contract involved in advertising. I, as a consumer, do not have a moral obligation to look at your ads. You, as a (hypothetical) publisher, do not have a moral obligation to make your content freely available. If someone chooses to publish content on the web for profit, and that person decides to make their content "freely" available (with advertising) rather than pursue some other business model, then the success or failure of that person's business is a strategic, but not a moral, matter.
The obvious technical solution to this problem is to make sure that ads seen on mysite.com are actually served from mysite.com, so that the "foreign blocker" won't be activated at all. This would probably mean that instead of just creating an account with DoubleClick, you would actually install some DoubleClick software on your server, which will regularly download banners to your site. This would have several effects:
- decreasing page load times for HTTP/1.1 browsers
- foiling the "foreign image" blocker
- making people think twice before slapping ads on their web pages.
In every dynamic ecology, you have an "arms race" between the 'prey' and the 'predator'. However, as Tom Ray points out, the rise of parasites (a form of non-lethal predator) leads, in the long run, to a more stable and diverse ecology.
In this example, banner ads are the parasite. They 'eat' attention (which Howard Rheingold pointed out is the irreducible resource on the Net) without giving anything back. (Of course, they *promise* to, but promising sybiosis and delivering parasitism is an old, old trick...) Therefore, it is logical for 'eyeballs' ('prey') to evolve various methods for protecting themselves, such as "tuning them out" (not paying attention) or developing devices that strip out images (a bit of an overkill, methinks, since you are ignoring anything that *might* be a parasite).
The counter I expect that will next be used by the parasites is 'mimicry': ads will try to pretend to be something that they are not.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Well, maybe not _everything_. I would love to see a feature enabling the user to block banner ads and other advertisements easily. I would also like it to offer a "block cookies" option, since I don't believe that other sites should have the ability to send me anything that I don't want. As a webmaster, I have never ever ever used cookies or banner ads. I don't see why anyone else has to either, aside from the obvious expiring password cookies.
"Leave no authority existing which does not answer to the people" --Thomas Jefferson
The feature is not "gone". It never went. You can enable it using a JS pref (as is said above). The UI is currently going through major upheaval as we head towards Netscape feature freeze date on the 16th of May, when all the Netscape engineers working on the project will stop checking in features (as they have a perfect right to do).
The current Mozilla builds are nightlies, downloaded by a few people for testing. If you download one, you'll find green and purple lines surrounding half the UI elements. Why? Debugging. Ugly? Yeah. A Slashdot story? No. Just more evidence of UI changes.
My point: this is _not_ a big deal. No-one has said this feature is going away from the code available from mozilla.org. Any feature that is destabilising the build could be deactivated. Tooltips are currently not working either, when they were last week. No fuss about that...
Gerv
(Declared interest: mozilla.org external QA volunteer) Please help: Get involved with Mozilla QA
Yes, popup windows are evil. How are we supposed to get our pr0n and 0-day w4r3z with all these blinking ads poping up everywhere?
It's not fair, something should be done - I demand the write to advertisement free stolen pr0n and w4r3z! Damn the capitalist pigs!
I think you misunderstand the theory about how ads work. They don't work becaues anyone has any kind of moral obligation to give them attention; they watch because most people are apathetic enough not to bother avoiding them. It's easy to avoid ads on TV (change the channel, mute the sound, fast forward on taped shows or if you have a TiVo), it's easy to avoid ads on the web (use junkbuster, or put the big adservers in your /etc/hosts). yet most people don't care enough to do even that, and that's why the whole ad system keeps working and will keep working.
If you read the link provided in the post, you will see that the post is totally ... wrong.
The link clarifies that the feature is still in the code of the builds, but is turned off by default. It also points out that at NO time did anyone say that the management were AOL management, and claims they had nothing to do with AOL ppl.
I don't think it was worth using a post '8970 bytes in body' to rehash half of what is mentioned in the link and add some bits to make it sound like a conspiracy. Slashdot is not supposed to be a tabloid.
---
First off, ads in general are generally fine, but the shockwave, streaming video, etc ads do more than "stretch it a bit." Sometimes they cause crashes and they generally cause slowdowns. That is not cool. I remember one site that had a rotating series of ads.
The site was important, but they really should have controlled their ads more. There were some ads that generated recurring pop-up windows, and the nasty animated movies with sound ads, poorly designed, with bad sound, that crashed my computer sometimes.
But the subject at hand, is really this feature of mozilla, which only disables "tracking" ads. We were all roped into using cookies because we were told they could not be used to nefariously invade privacy. Enter Doubleclick, who proved that wrong, but it was too late.
Now even if you block cookies, you can be tracked because of these web bug ads that are placed on different servers and connect back to a central location, where data can be collected on you against your will, and you have no control over it. It can also be used to generate spam for you, which is always a nice feature.
I don't care how cool your site is, you have no business having web bugs on it, or requiring us to participate in these "marketing surveys."
Most web browsers won't cache content generated dynamicly by CGI scripts; Slashdot generated this way. Nothing to do with the adds.
So, the feature browsers REALLY need is the ability to disable popup windows. I've been tempted to try and do it myself, but the time and laziness factors have won so far.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
You ARE being paid to watch a commercial. You're being paid with the quality television programming that the advertiser is giving you.
Everyone go out and try an ad filtering proxy today! It makes your browsing experience so much more tolerable!
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
This would have been a good one to include, if it was posted when this story was submitted:
------- Additional Comments From morse@netscape.com 2000-05-09 00:09 -------
Let me clarify something here. Contrary to popular opinion, this feature was never "yanked" from the product! It's still there, alive and well, and getting compiled into every build. It's all under control of a pref (imageblocker.enabled). The pref is currently defaulted to "false" (in all.js) but an implementation is free to change that if it chooses to do so.
Sure, we've got lots of reasons to fear / hate the AOL continuum. Let's not make up any more unless it's necessary (or really funny).
---
Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
"It may not be illegal as such, but it is certainly immoral."
Just as you say for certain that it is immoral, I can say to you for certain that it is not. Pushing your morals on other people is a pointless excercise in mind-control.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I'm not going to get into arguing what is "quality" television and what isn't. Suffice to say that advertising supported television is just like HBO except that one you pay for with your checkbook, the other you pay for with your time.
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Of COURSE they take that into account. You missed the whole point.
The more people actually watch the commercials, the more valuable the advertising space will be, so the more money the advertisers pay to the guys creating the content. Higher budgets result in the potential for higher quality content. So watching advertising contributes to better television.
I would think companies like Akamai (interactive content distributors) would breathe a sigh of relief at this news. Their entire business model is based off of sending images and "interactive content" from their server, while you server the HTML. If you couldn't do that anymore (or even if it got turned off by a majority of users) Akamai would be worth about 2 cents on the dollar. Just my 0.02
one of my friends in high school "accidentally" "stumbled" across a porn site at the beginning of this year in english class. he called the teacher over and asked her to "please get him out of this nasty stuff"
it was really really funny watching her try to get out of the popup jungle....porn all over the place and nothing she could do about it. she finally asked me how to reboot the iMac she was using and so I did it for her
the guy did it again about 5 minutes later. god that was a great day.
At least IE does cache CGI-pages. Anyways, don't you think the poster knew what he was talking about? I think all his points is valid, since I've experienced them myself.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
iCab on Mac OS takes a different, very successful approach to this. It lets you skip images that are contained in a specified subdirectory, say /ad or /advert, as well as images from known ad-servers. In practice, this blocks about 95% of ad images. The only bad side-effect I've had is on The Register which puts some strange images (like the little cartoon graphics in their BOFH features) in /advert for some reason. Still, this approach by and large works great, and it's totally user configurable.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
I would predict that if the feature stays and goes into wide spread usage, then sites will either stop tailoring their pages to Mozilla (and start using Explorer only features) or have their pages actively misdisplay on Mozilla.
.25 of a hit...)
After all, the unspoken compact is that if you visit a site with ads, you're gaining their content in exchange for the ads they will expose you to. If you aren't willing to "pay" for that content by being exposed to the ads, why should they let you look at the content at all?
I'd imagine that ad companies might well statr "discounting" hits from Mozilla users. (Only 25% of mozilla users see our ads, so they only count for
If Mozilla is to be commercially viable, it *must* force the viewing of ads. Let third party utilities that work on either platform equally well do the blocking.
Since Mozilla is open sourced, surely *IF* the feature is removed entirely from the code, someone somewhere can maintain a patch to stick the feature back in. While Mozilla runs like crap on my system (scrolling is faster than NS 4.7, but everything else is unusable), I thought this feature was one of the best features I've seen in a browser, best feature since the ability to be warned about someone wanting to set a cookie. I can understand AOL and the like getting pissed at this, but surely as it's open sourced we can keep features, and add more like this.
There are always other [usually better] ways to block ads-- two programs which are shareware/free webwasher and naviscope. Webwasher seems to block ads much more efficiently, it uses multiple criterium including an interesting one: image dimensions. As well, you can setup squid [a very very nice free proxy for *nix platforms] to block advertisments proxy-side. I block ads for my school for the sole purpose of saving bandwidth-- unfortunately to count hits many advertising sites insist on setting no-cache for the images which their cgis send... logs indicated most of our bandwidth was going to downloading advertisments, so they're nixed until they decide to play nice with our overtaxed connection.
Bruce: are you telling us you don't know the app named lynx?
paying for impressions is a fairly broken model, with the door wide open for abuse (download your own banners from a few IPs with a perl-LWN script faking a referer!). for web advertising to really work, it should reward only cliks, and only those clicks that give something of value to the target site (that can be a purchase for e-commerce sites, or a user registration for community sites, or a minimum number of pageviews from the same browser, etc). getting paid because someone downloaded an image is just broken.
Not necessary. Find your prefs.js file and add this at the end:
user_pref("imageblocker.enabled", true);
Note that if you want to go back later to turn it back off, it probably won't still be at the end of your prefs file because mozilla alphabetizes your prefs list each time you close the program.
--
The shareholder is always right.
amen :)
you should try www.modperl.com port 80
as your proxy server to block ads.
--
If Microsoft is the solution, I want my problems back
And many people don't understand that not everyone wants ads, and screw the sites that goes down because of lack of ad-revenue. Also, you don't earn money by people downloading the banners. People have to click on them, IF YOU DON'T CLICK ON BANNERS YOU ARE ESSENTIALLY STEALING? d;-)
Laugh, this discussion is silly. Me and my friends NEVER asked the commercial crackpots to turn WWW into World Wild Web.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You are either a plant or on idiot.
:-)
Wow, I must use this one time
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Good point. However, would the people in the advertising industry then move to other industries, making them more productive, making the standard of living better for everyone?
I really don't know. This is where economics gets really tricky. It's like people who protest automation of physical labor because it puts people out of jobs. It seems like that automation would be good for society: Same number of products and services provided, with less effort by society to provide them. Ok, I'm way OT here, so I'll stop. Just curious is anyone who has a better understanding of economics would care to explain this.
I have two intelligent comments on this discussion that I've gleamed from NANAE, where this issue has been discussed over my "Ultimate HOSTS File of All Time":
- The internet is not a cornucopia of advertising revenue.
- Advertisers: An expectation of revenue on your part in no way constitutes an obligation on my part.
And would you call browsing the web with lynx stealing? (You cannot see all those ads, can you?) Also graphical browsers with option to disable image downloading should be made illegal?
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
That's the question that kept running through my head as I read this article. If I already have the source in hand, and the bug report states that removal from the menu is just that - removal from the menu, and that the actual code will remain in the codebase, why is it an issue?Seems to me that this only applies as an issue to John & Jane Public, who don't know or care how to edit code and just want to unpack a browser. Of course, it's this same group that is likely to just live with banner ads anyway, and it's this group that banner ads target.If AOL/Netscape wants to remain a player in the future of web browsing, they're going to have to be supported by the commercial interests that are slowly taking over the web. Leaving the code in is simply a gift for those of us willing to edit our source and build a browser capable of ignoring banner ads.
Devolver's Homepage... more fun than a box of crackerjacks.
actually, the akamaized link should stay the same (e.g. a935.g.akamaitech.net/...). akamai's dynamic dns chooses the best box to serve it to you, so your squid cache should only contain one copy.
- mark
Since nothing really happend and the article above gives a trivial way to enable the preference. Why was this posted a day later on Slashdot anyway?
Slashdot banners used to come from an IP address rather than a domain to prevent /etc/hosting them away.
n .gif?957954892780
.oO0Oo.
I notice that the one I have on this page now is from :
http://betaimages.slashdot.org/banner/quio0002e
so maybe things are changing
So many sites remain in existance because of banner ads that I think it's a bit unfair personally to have them turned off in the browser.
I don't like ads but I have managed to live with them for long enough. Commercial realities exist.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This sounds like a reasonable idea to begin with, but if you think about it, its not that great.
/ads. You can't block them, Joe gets published on a high-performance server for free (I'm guessing this would be the base ad deal, with money accruing for a higher hit count), and all that hot air over ad blocking was worthless.
If you block ads from other sites, how will the ads make it onto your pages? By frames and overlays. Which brings us to the transclusion issue: what about sites that frame other sites? If you block these, then some real, useful sites will stop working...but it still won't stop advertisers.
Here's a business model for ya: Joe Schmo has a site he wants to fund by advertising. He doesnt have a big server though, and the advertisers worry about ad-blocking.
Result? Ad company sets up a proxy webserver (in the style of 'crit.org') which pulls Joe's content onto their server, caches it, and displays it. Ads are on the same server - say in
Cheers,
Baz
Your arguement relies heavily on 'the right to make money off of someone'. I don't think there is such a right, there is only a 'right to *try* to make money off of someone'. And try they do, 'serving' me with hundreds of ads each day (not only the web). If I receive junkmail, I throw it away without reading it. Sure, someone spent money on sending it, but that doesn't mean I appreciate their efforts. I don't in any way feel obliged to read/view/listen to advertisements, nor should I be. If I want some company's pricelist I'll ask for it. And there is one more thing: Suppose the banner I got to see was some porn site. Even if I do not like to see porn, I would not be allowed to filter this. A banner itself may have objectionable content to some people.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Or, even worse, banners would start to come in new shapes and sizes. As it is, they're common enough to be almost subliminally recognizable, and therefore ignored. If they start to change because of banner-blocking, they're going to be just as obnoxious as when they first started to become popular.
Leave the banners alone, I say -- at least as far as the major apps go. If you really don't like them, there are several good third-party progs that will take care of them fairly effectively (including /. banners, which I no longer see).
Got Rhinos?
So is it stealing to switch channels or change radio stations durring commercials? Is it immoral to fastforward commercials on recorded TV programs? Or the real killer: should TVs with features that automatically mute commercials or change the channel for you be banned?
Of course, just like radio and TV commercials, I dont "block" them I usually just tune them out. Never even pay attention. I think most people have that sort of "viewing habbit".
Why is everyone so pissed of because of Netscape allegedly influencing some features in their own product? Netscape gave away it's code with the intent of additions being made by others, but they never promised to incorporate ALL the features brouth in by others.
I think Netscape has every right to disable this feature, if they want to. If you do not like it, then use the Mozilla branded version or compile your own. This is after all the idea behind open source software. If poeple didn't have a choice besides Netscape this would be a different story, but luckily there is a choice thanks to the open source nature of the product.
There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't
YES YES YES YES YES.
Many sites are experimenting with Akamai and other localized providers for high-bandwidth items such as images.
I mean, i suppose it would be an okay feature if you KNOW how it works, and you understand things like akamai, but can you imagine how constraining this would be on web developers?
--
"I think there is a world market for, maybe, five computers." __ IBM Chairman, 1943 __
In fact, it's:
- HOSTS
- DNS Server
- NetBIOS Cache
- WINS
- Broadcast
- LMHOSTS
If I recall this correctly (been awhile since I needed to know this- more useless trivia on the MCSE tests!)The above comment is CopyWrong (K) Erisian Entertainment. All Rights Reversed. Ewige Blumenkraft!
To get mozzila! but now that I can't kill off those pathetic porn adds, I think I'll keep my bandwidth , drop netscape, and go straight back to lynx. Btw, will lynx ever support https ? or does it already ? doesn't look so to me!
b0rk b0rk moose
a) All graphics, ads and content
b) No graphics.
An evil webmaster would make sure that the site really sucked in alternative b) and as I claimed: Big sites would get away with it, small sites would not.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Well, obvioulsy slashdot DID try to check the facts, by emailing the developers at mozilla, who didn't reply bar one....
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Now, it's almost a joke. I upgraded to N6 for about half an hour, then went back to 4.7. The power of the Dark Side has grown strong....
What's next? Is IE going to become the One True Browser?
Got Rhinos?
Can I get an amen?
Got Rhinos?
Pardon me? A condition of viewing the page? Sorry, but no. If you want to make viewing your ads a condition of viewing your page, I want a nice little script that pops up before the page does, that essentially reads "by visiting this site you agree to not bypass any ads that are hosted on this page"-- with an "ok" button to let me in, and a "cancel" button to kick me out to Slashdot (or wherever).
Five tons of flax.
However, being able to right-click on an image and select "no more images from this site" is convenient. I hope that feature will survive.
I would hope that one way or another, Mozilla will actually become as customizable as Emacs, with user-definable hooks for most actions. Then, you could define URL-PRELOAD-HOOK, URL-POSTLOAD-HOOK, FORM-PRESUBMISSION-HOOK, and all those things yourself to implement the privacy and advertising policies you like yourself.
There's nothing more god aweful than when my kids some how accidentally find themselves in porn land without any way of escape. It happends and I don't think it's because my kids are looking for it. I am able to supervise most of the time, and sometimes they need me to rescue them from the jaws of pop up window porn hell. It's really embarrassing when you just can't kill them! Left and right! windows regenerating like it's nothing!
"NOO!!! LEAVE MY DADDY ALONE!!!!"
"AHHHH!!!"
"THERE'S TOO MANY OF THEM!!!"
"OH MY GOD, HONEY! ARE YOU OKAY?!"
"STAND BACK! I'M GONNA NUKE IT!"
It's my feeling that this is an invaluable weapon against these god aweful pop up windows and banners. Also this would be a great feature when I'm on my laptop equiped with a 14.4. Download webpages is hell. I would use lynx, but you can't get the layout of the page. I beg of you, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE include this feature. Thank you.
For a summary of every comment that would otherwise have been posted in this thread, read the feature again.
Not that I mind seeing Slashdot becoming the web's answer to 20/20 style investigative reporting, but it doesn't seem like there's much left to discuss.
-Denor
Is it wrong for me to choose not to get local channels but use my dish. The ads were paid for. So I should swallow every one? Heck, I may be depriving the advertisers of services by not showing my friends advertisements at a party. Is PROXYING Wrong? If I can block porn why not ADS? I'm the one who chooses to enable that feature not AOL. You are either a plant or on idiot.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Yes, Lynx does support HTTPS, though you have to patch the source for it to do so.
In this content, junk-busting banner ads feels to me as if the reader is trying to welsh on their part of the bargain.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Almost all the commercial WebPages on the internet use ad-banners to make money, for many websites (slashdot and yahoo included) this is their primary source of ongoing income. If you include features to block ad-banners in a major browser you will damage their income.
If this were to really happen you would run the risk of moving into an arms race between website designers trying to squeeze their banners past the checks (in order to gain ad-revenue) and the browser hackers trying to eliminate them. Now obviously there is little to stop individuals from patching browsers, proxies etc.. Themselves but really and truly is this not steeling from the web publishers?
but then I started thinking about me as a developer and sites that I've built to make heavy use of services like akamai. now _none_ of my images will show up in your browser because all of the images are served out of akamaitech.net (akamai's distributed network). now it doesn't sound so great...
unless I could setup akamaitech.net as an exception, and therefore acceptable to fetch images from (but how many average joe users of netscape would actually understand why my page looked bad in the first place?). but then, if I allow akamai images, the ad banner folks will just start akamaizing their delivery (not a bad idea to begin with), and I'm back to square one...
just my (probably incoherent) ramblings...
- mark
If you put your existing ads into /ads on your boxen, then Akamai should be able to let you serve yours from /ads as well. Evolve or die. Slow ass ad servers are a plague, and Akamai seems to be representative lately.
matt
I'm sure your proxies will work well for the Linux crowd... In case the Windows crowd (am I alone here? shiver) needs one, check out adsubtract at adsubtract.com. It's freaking cool, it's hella stable, and the Opera 4 beta is the only browser not supported. It apparently won't be with Opera's method of grabbing webpages, something i'm not too familiar with ^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
Contrast this with popular closed-source software: in some cases, a lot of effort has gone into making the software *less* useful to its end users in the name of protecting one revenue stream or another. AOL's Instant Messenger program is a good example: it's a useful program with a fairly good-sized list of features (and incompatibilities) aimed at ad revenue protection with no benefit whatsoever to the consumer.
Don't misunderstand: I'm not against ad-supported services (in fact, I work for a company whose business is ad-sponsored mobile communication). But the consumer needs to retain control--and I think that the flexibility offered by open source software by and large ensures that this is the case.
Phil
OK, before standing here and bitching about the evils of AOL/Time Warner, i actually took the time and read the bug report - and guess what - they didn't take out the feature! The bugzilla report even tells you how to put it back in. Just add
user_pref("imageblocker.enabled", true);
to your prefs.js file, and everything's cool again. Don't worry. There's even real rational as to why they removed it, and I agree with them, as long as I can keep it on.
Side note re. Bruce's earlier comment - Consider leaving ads on, eh? I like Slashdot, so I view their ads. Ditto for Technocrat and many other sites. This is how they stick around. It's just nice to shut off graphics on things like search engines, or heavy sites that take too long to load.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
If there were no banner ads, how many of your favorite web sites would no longer exist? I can think of one example: SLASHDOT. Do you really think Andover would have bought slashdot.org and poured money into running it if there was not a steady stream of ad revenue coming in? How about news.com, freshmeat.net, epinions, or many other content- or community-centric web sites? These companies have to have revenue to operate. Ad banners are in many cases the main or sole source of that revenue. Blocking ads at the browser level is irresponsible to the Web community.
...................
...................
...................
For many web sites, and even many services, ad banners are the only source of revenue for many web sites. I don't have a problem with them. The only problem I have with add banners is when I get cookies from doubleclick, or whomever. I like cookie technology. It is a very useful tool for web-designers, and makes many things possible quite easily.
I am glad to see that I can require all cookies I recieve to come from the site I am looking at, and not some third party making millions by watching everywhere I go on the internet.
I may not be in Kansas anymore, but you just keep your wicked witch eyes and your friggin flying monkies off of me!
At first I was overcome with conspiracy theories, too...but I now think its because the initial implementation was not so good, and the the interested coders are doing something much more ambitious...
I read all the news.mozilla.org newsgroups pretty regularly (IANAP: "I am not a programmer"). Around a year or a year and a half ago there was debate about an image-blocking feature. Many developers took the attitude of "Banner ads are how many many sites make money; we think that including this feature would result in sites that we support losing money."
I, and others, disagreed with this: it was debateable who was making money with banner ads in the first place, and furthermore we felt that their argument could be made about cookies and a dozen other technologies. Users clamor for the the ability to control their browsing experience, and Mozilla, an org with users, not a corporate strategies, as their motive, was refusing to implement this feature.
Time passed. The double-click scandal broke. Image filtering shareware/add-ons appeared in earnest. Icab (a great Mac web-browser) appeared with amazing image-filtering capabilities.
And then, one day, image filtering appeared in Mozilla! There were almost no discussions of it in the newsgroups, and my attempts to start threads failed. But I was VERY happy.
The functionality was part of the cookie-filtering scheme they had in place. You could check "ask before accepting a cookie" and "ask before accepting an image" from the prefs, and then you'd get a dialog box saying "the site images.slashdot.org wants to load an image..." You could accept this one time, refuse this one time, or have your decision remembered for the future. I quickly refused for all time "doubleclick.com" images and cookies, and quite a few others. I didn't only block banner images; I found that a site like moviefone.com works MUCH faster with no images, so I perminantly rejected them.
Then, one day, the image-blocking functionality was gone. I asked and asked why on the UI newsgroups, but no one responded, excpet with the standard "If you want it, you do it." I finnally decided I WAS going to try to add the functionality back, if I could. (I was hoping that any C++ programming was still in place, and that the only code that was removed were the XML and JavaScript files that make up Mozilla's user interface.)
I poked around, and learned a bunch. (Mozilla is going to be really good, I think.) Before I got deeply into it, I found a post by Mike Shaver on the LAYOUT newsgroup (I think Netscape pays him to work on Mozilla). I include most of his message below becaue I think it points out a few things about Mozilla:
* Mozilla is composed mostly of developers who are working, not bothing to explain their thoughts to other people who aren't familiar with their projects;
* Different people involved with building Mozilla disagree about different stuff...after watching them, I'm convinced that their heirarchical structure is sound, that is, good, open minded, smart-as-shit people who seem to be good at managing other contributors are Module Owners;
* The pace of development is fast as shit.
I asked Mike to clarify his thoughts and he did. It seems to me that he wants to make "content blocking" broader than "image blocking;" that this fucntionality will be part of a general "zones" pref where users can block according to zones. There has been MUCH discussion about this in Mozilla for a while, and it seems like it's going to get done "the RIGHT WAY."
Here's Mike's post:
Subject: lighting a candle: nsIContentPolicy
Date: 26 Apr 2000 01:44:16 GMT
From: shaver@zeroknowledge.com (Mike Shaver)
Organization: evil evil evil men
Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.layout
I dislike a number of things about the current image-blocking infrastructure, namely:
- it causes core layout functionality (imagelib) to depend on the ``cookie'' extension,
- the control interfaces are mushed into the cookie manager, which seems to me to be unrelated, and
- it's insufficiently general: I might well want to block or or or the same way.
So I spent some time thinking about this, because it's really not helpful to just bitch (thought I confess that I did a fair bit of that, too), and came up with the attached.
Basically, I have a general interface for controlling the loading of certain kinds of out-of-line content, and for controlling the processing of certain kinds of in-line content. (I'm not so sure the latter is useful, but it's nagging at me that I'd like to do something with it, and I with the current state of API pressure I'd rather get it in and have it be unused or disabled later than have to champion it during more conservative times.)
I will add to this by providing an implementation of nsIContentPolicy, which will in turn load all the registered policy widgets (via a "content-policy" category). The attached patch is not by any means complete, and is probably not worth applying, but it shows where I'm
headed. I'm going to hack more on this week's SFO round trip, batteries willing, and see if I can't get it ready to land. I hope to adapt split
the cookie manager into a new extensions/content-policy component, but I
might need some help with that.
Comments welcome, of course.
{patch snipped}
"Content providers put money into providing that content. Even NBC, which is mostly filled with drivel, spends a lot of money on editing, management and facilities. In exchange, they want a few minutes on the screen in which they can advertise. That's the quid-pro-quo: you watch their content, you pay them back with your attention to their ads.
In this content, changing the channel feels to me as if the viewer is trying to welsh on their part of the bargain.
Thanks"
How much sense did the preceeding paragraph make? None at all. There is no material difference between the situation with regards to banner ads and the situation in the case of commericials on television. I certainly did not make any bargain with the web sites that I read or visit to view their ads; they (they being the operators of the sites) chose to make their sites freely accessible to anyway with an IP address and a web browser. Did I have to click-through a license agreement to view the site? Would such a click-through license even be valid? Once the banner ads leave the server of the web site, I can do anything I want with them, including rejecting connections (via ipmasq) from the server at the port level, filtering out the images via a proxy, or instructing my browser not to display the ads.
What we really need is the option to disallow web browers from opening up new windows without asking (or even disallowing this entirely).
I'm sure we've all been to pages that open up several new windows filled with ads and we close them only to find they spawn even more copies when they close. Its just silly that a web page can have such control over your computer. The people who thought that "feature" up were probably the ones who let you run VB scripts directly in Outlook. Or maybe it was those at Netscape who let let the Netscape "banner" box hover on top of your applications while you wait minutes for navigator to load (hey, my computer is slow).
Lastly, I think its ironic that the only web page I've seen that actually has a "close" button on it actually causes IE to prompt me before it closes the window.
There is an easy fix for this in DNS:
content.xyz.com. IN CNAME host123.akamai.com.
The problem is the same fix would also be used for the banner companies, making the new feature easily circumvented.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Quick! Confiscate my JunkBuster proxy files too, they're evidence! I'm waiting for the ominous call from DoubleClick's lawyers...
In my opinion, no solid statistics, all statements extrapolated from personal experience.
/. will drag in far more hits in one day than the banners on the top of the page will get in a month, they exist because they're the only form of currency the web has.
/. anymore?
:)
This is silly. Lets face it, banner ads exist now not because they're actually worthwhile, getting linked in a single article on
Most of the advertising "revenue" made these days is not in fact revenue at all, invariably its part of a banner-swapping deal, I'll run banners for you if you run banners for me. Even in the cases where there is money paid, in plainly doesn't make sense:
Site A gets money for ad views
Therefore Site A is more profitable if it gets more hits
Therefore Site A pays other sites to advertise, to increase its hits, so that those hits translate into ad views...for other sites...
The only places that are actually playing this game effectively are sites with valuable content, which are populated by word of mouth more than anything else (/. being a prime example), and sites that are making real sales on their website (Amazon etc).
These are a small fraction of the web, the rest is populated by mediocre content attempting to increase its hit rate by getting banners everywhere it can, a pointless exercise as users have now almost entirely done the job Mozilla would only complete, they've tuned out.
Even if they do read the banner ad, they've been stung so many times by clicking on an ad to find a boring, pointless or overly complex page that they no longer bother. The ads are intrusive but we appear to be mentally well equiped from years of TV to filter them out without even realising it.
How many of you even notice ads on
The massive popularity of banner ads is a simple result of human need for a solid number. We can't estimate our websites effectiveness in terms of brand awareness, we can't develop a solid business plan for a website based on word of mouth, we need numbers. We got n hits, we sold n ads, we bought n ads, next month we will sell n ads and buy m ads and get n hits. Pretty graphs, but utterly useless when you realise that the revenue is actually n-m, often a negative number.
Doubleclick and co know this, they've seen it coming, and they're desperately trying to increase the effectiveness of their trade. Targetted ads, profiling etc, but it isn't really working because its too late, they overdid it at the start and now we're filtering out anything that looks vaguely like an ad.
I don't however expect a recognition of this from either ad companies or businesses that buy and sell ads. Why? its like every other currency that we have, a vast portion of it is illusory, its a convinience that gives us a justifiable excuse to do something. Does anybody ever believe the US will pay off its national debt? no. Does that stop them trading with the US in US$? no, its the currency itself that has become important, not the backing behind it.
But if you want to create a successful website, as opposed to a website with pretty graphs, you need to listen not to the accountants, but to the users. The Cluetrain (http://www.cluetrain.org/) has it all there for you in nice bullet points.
I say putting advertising blocks in Mozilla is merely acknowleging the truth of the situation, its being honest and it may well have the effect of having website operators start building their websites with a view to how the web really works, instead of the current communal delusion.
My 2c
You can't win a fight.
Forgive me if it's done already, but how about a feature that blocks annoying popup windows? Like the ones that, when you close the browser or hit back, it pops up a new window, making it VERY difficult to get rid of? Everyone knows these things, everyone hates these things.
Yeah, I know turning off javascript in general would do the trick, but there's alot of sites out there that use javascript in more legit, the-way-it-was-intended-to-be ways, and I don't want to block them out too.
And yes, I know there's software out there that blocks those (I use one, though it doesn't block 100%) but I'm talking about a feature integrated into the browser to kill that sort of thing. Like maybe a window could come up and warn you about the page trying to pop up a window, then ask if it should be allowed, disallowed, or ALWAYS disallow and never bug me with the question again.
Just a thought.
----
Overall, I have been quite pleased with the quality of news that Jamie reports on. I was especially impressed with her series on library e-censorship. Most articles are simply a link and a short opinion commentary. This was more than that. It is clear that Jamie went out of her way to e-mail developers and verify the facts that she could. Sure, she could have e-mailed various execs at AOL to find out what happened, but it is unlikely that she would find a response.
I don't dislike the normal format. In fact I find it somewhat refreshing that Slashdot culls its news from its users. But I think that there is room for this sort of journalism too. I personally don't have the time to e-mail developers from the Mozilla project to find out exactly why this feature (which I like) was removed.
I felt that this article did exactly what it was intended to do. It brought up an issue of contention within the Open Source community, and then it explained some of the views and rationale behind the feature removal.
No, this wasn't a "Whoa cool, we have practical worm holes now" sort of article, but it was informative. It is also abundantly clear that Jamie cares about producing "News for Nerds."
I say "Bravo!"
Kudos for some of the better journalism that I've seen on Slashdot.
Compared to Junkbuster, it seems to be a very different beast. SquidGuard has a few features that look handy, such as being able to mangle the data, good logging, and restricted access based on time, user, .... This seems ideal for personal, network and even for a home lan -w- kids.
Does SquidGuard work with proxy-sensitive sites, like Hotmail? That was my main issue making a filtering proxy the default for users on my network.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
You naughty *TROLL*!
Viewing advertisments is not paying for your content. You are under no obligation, implied or otherwise, to view ads. The content is offered for free.
While the assumption made by the sponsor is that X content viewers = X ad viewers = x-y(rational people)= actual sales, that is an assumption, not a compulsion or obligation.
Whether y is the number of people who think for themselves, or y is the number of people who hit the mute button on their remote during commercials, or y is the number of people who get up and go potty or grab a beer, or use TiVo to time-shift past the commercials, or whether y is the number of people who disable banners, that assumption is made by the sponsor, and is risk inherent in the venture, and is reflected in the value of the ad "real-estate".
The only real effect here is that our value for Y increases, and the risk to sponsors rises, and therefore the value of that ad real-estate declines. The outcome, a simple escalation of advertising: 1 ad previously viewed by 100,000 people costs $100,000, now viewed by 10,000 people, now only costs $10,000, so instead of one ad, the content providers must now sell 10 ads to get the same revenue. Or, the content provider must also provide a better method of binding the advertising to the content - which will result in, probably, proprietary content formats bound to proprietary viewers, which do not permit ad filtering. (or in a simpler form, probably ad banners that originate on the same server and rotate via a CGI or something).
Either way, the costs to content providers and advertisers will increase, again decreasing the value of the ad "real-estate".
While we can imagine this game running a few dozen rounds in web browsers, other than stuff like product placement, I don't really see any alternative to ad-supported TV broadcasting when you throw a powerful weapon like TiVo into the mix.
Except a migration to a pay-per-view model.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
On a related note, just when Microsoft (partially) mended their ways by making their distributed download sites more predictable and thereby less likely to cause "cache aliasing", enter Akamai, whose business model seems to be based on URL aliasing.
I'm talking about the effects that content distribution has on caches like Squid. In a typical week after a new update of Internet Explorer is released, I find my Web caches filled with identical copies of files downloaded off different sites like msvaus.www.conxion.com and mskyus.www.conxion.com -- with an "intelligent" process at Microsoft deciding which site to point this particular download to. This hurts with 1000 users sitting behind the slow connections to our offices. Renegociating the bandwidth pricing is not in the cards either :-)
So, does anyone have any info on how Akamai can work together with Web caches?
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Now, although this is still hypothetical that the man has layed the smack down on this feature.. it can still go to show that we will dominate because open source gives us what we want, not what the billionaires want.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
True -- if I run a web site providing a free service, I need to support it. This is especially important with free software sites; advertising may well be a good way for Open Source projects with a high number of hits on their web page/day to make some money to further development.
That said, what's wrong with using less offensive, textual adds without graphics?
Just something along the lines of, (and I'll use my project at this point:)
Kosmos Online is sponsored by pfui.net (now featuring fascinating hunks of gorp for $14.99/mo. -- rich and creamy!)
and maybe a little further down:
Please visit our sponsors, as they provide money to keep Kosmos Online going.
An effective compromise, IMHO.
Nothing is more annoying than watching as the banner downloads first, it's big, loud, animated, and annoying, and you can't actually read anything on the page which you want to. And text is faster to transmit, thereby solving the problem that somebody mentioned of ads sucking up bandwidth.
Just a thought...
Nicholas
disclaimer: opinions contained therein are not neccessarily those of my employer.
I've not been able to connect to netscape.com at all today, and I have a T1. What on earth? They're one of the 10 most visited sites. Is this another DDOS or can they not handle the traffic of every netscape browser having netscape.com as the home page?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
This is also a chance for the public, or the /. fraction thereof, to give feedback to Mozilla. You're getting it. Here's my two cents: We ABSOLUTELY want an end to abusive banner ads and surfer surveillance, and we want at least some of these user-protection features built into our browser instead of having to hang on an external proxy filter. Capisce?
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Personally, I regard these advertisements as stealing my meager 33.6KBPS bandwidth from me, and in some cases holding the rest of the webpage hostage until they load themselves.
As a webmaster of a site that has ad banners on it to offset server costs, personally, I regard people that block my banners as stealing content from me.
Nobody's forcing you to go to these sites with banners. The bandwidth isn't being "stolen", it's a condition of viewing the page.
NO CARRIER
Ok, so publishers are paid by the number of ad's
pulled from ad sites as the result of viewing publisher's pages. Here's how I can support those publishers and keep my sanity: the browser will pull the ads but WON'T display them. How 'bout that? Looks like a decent proposition if you don't care much about wasted bandwidth.
First: get the Proxomitron HTML pre-processor
http://members.tripod.com/Proxomitron/
Then put together a list of "kill" characteristics. Suggestions would include domains you don't want to retrieve and known banner sizes. There are numerous configurable ad banner killers where you can get this information.
Not running Windoze? Sorry, Proxomitron is only written for windows. I've sent email to the author asking about conversion to Linux for use in firewalls but never got any response. Maybe somebody else will have better luck. Sure would like to know if they do.
fredthompson@mindspring.com
This is not the first time a usefull feature got removed from Mozilla. I remember there once was Google selectable as a search machine for Mozilla "Internet Search" (Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet Search -> Search using:). However, this list got somewhat "shortened" in M14 (or was it M13?). Note that this list of search machines is _not configurable_, so you can not add or remove server yourself. I guess all the search machines in there are more or less related to AOL in some way. Comments?
Perhaps....
Far too many people have trouble with that last one...
Contrary to what many of you may think, banner ad revenue is generated by "impressions" which is how many times the ad is downloaded to the clients, and is not primarily based on "click throughs."
Analogizing banner ads to tv ads is inaccurate, because, while it takes very little time to ignore a banner ad and get to what you really want (aside from download time), you can't just skip a tv ad and get back to your show. Even if you don't pay any attention to it, you still have to wait.
Let's stop comparing apples and oranges, people!
I think that the option should still be there, but most people doesn't seem to realize how web advertising works. The web page owners get paid per downloaded ad. This means that when you surf without adblocking, you are generating revenues (albeit small ones) for the web page owners. When you block ads, the ad images are not downloaded, and the web page owners get no money.
ZZ
There's a much better way to block banner ads than at the browser level. Simply use Squid Proxy Server and the GNU filtering package squidGuard. That way there's no possibility of the damn SPAMMERS to get to your desktop.
I use Proxomitron (Windows app) to filter ads and annoying java script - it works brilliantly and it's free.
With all due respect, the explanations for why the feature was "temporarily disabled" are very unconvincing. If the reason is that it was "confusing", ok, just turn off the "block this image" popup menu item and leave the "allow/disallow images from this site" under "tools > personal managers". If the reason was changes to the UI code, then how come the cookieblocker code (essentially identical) always worked fine. What kind of "problems" are we talking about?
:-/
A feature that requires manually adding a weird incantation to a prefs file is WAY out of reach for ordinary users (yes, ppl do use mozilla milestones even if they're not developers). It is either there and always on, or might as well not be there at all. E.g. Netscape 4.x has a hidden pref to not send referrer headers, but how many people know that?
Being concerned that AOL/Time Warner will want to give users less choice about ads seems very logical to me, hardly "blowing things out of proportion", "absurd and conspiracist" as Blake Ross tries to frame it. Yes, people are upset, as they should be. I would guess that someone wanted to see if they could just remove the feature, and I'm happy that the answer everyone seems to be giving them is NO.
I have a few questions:
- Who came up with/implemented/supported this feature? I want to thank them... then again, if they work for AOL, they probably want to keep a low profile right about now
- Who added the "imageblocker.enabled" preference, default to false? Would they explain why? How was the decision made? Was there any discussion of it before it was done?
- What would it take to get rid of the "imageblocker.enabled" pref completely and have the feature permanently on?
- Will this feature be in Netscape 6? If not, why?
- Will this feature be in a stable non-developer release by Mozilla.org?
My main reason for using mozilla is this feature. If this weren't there, I'll probably be running IE5.5 inside vmware (sigh). As it is, every few days I compile the latest mozilla with a patch to turn that feature on (heh, also with -O3 -fexpensive-optimizations -mcpu=pentiumpro). Starting from the next milestone release, I will make those builds publicly available. Anyone want to help hack this to use regexps?
Okay, fair warning.
I helped get a wonderful little start-up rollign that provided great internet play for on-line games. It died because the market decided that they preferred half-assed, ad sponsored, free play. So maybe I'm a touch bitter and its showing BUT.....
Ya Can't Have It Both Ways Folks!!!
Its eitehr pay the freight for the internet and i-services yourselves, or let advertiser pay for it. The public in general have made their preference clear for an ad sponsored internet.
IF anyone DID manage to get a browser out there that successfully blocked ads all that would happen is all the "free" services would go away and it all would become subscriber-fee based.
One way or another, the piper has to be paid.
You haven't tried NS6 - it hasn't been released! There's a *reason* why people call things ß releases. It's because they are *not ready for general consumption*. So please try the release version before deciding whether or not it is a joke.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I run a site that gets all income from ads, plus a few T-shirt sales. I like to sell ads. I like to get money from ads. I like to spend the money I get from ads on fun stuff like huge servers and tiny cel phones. And yet, with all that, it strikes me as unmitigated nonsense to claim that not viewing ads is stealing.
It's completely unsupportable to say that by reading my page, you've entered into some sort of contract, the terms of which are hidden from you and changed according to how I'd like to make money. Yes, if people turned off all ads, it would affect my income. It would also affect my income if people stopped buying the stupid crap they see in ads (like tiny cel phones, for instance), or if they didn't want to wear T-shirts with the name of my site on them, but I'd laughed off the net if I claimed that there was some sort of invisible contract that required you to buy a shirt after enjoying so many features.
Publishers of free content, myself included, are taking advantage of a series of coincidences, that's all; sometimes these coincidences verge in such a way that someone spends some money, and thousands of companies are designed to make this happenstance more likely. It's a sign of naivete (on the part of readers) and hubris (on the part of the aforementioned companies) to claim that this thin thread of chance constitutes some sort of fundamental right to not only make money, but to make money the way you're used to.
Anyhow, all this back-and-forth could be avoided by making the invisible contract visible. Just require readers to register and sign a contract stating that they will read all ads assiduously and consider them deeply. And then you can watch as the readers fail to beat a path to your virtual door. Sometimes chance is more effective than certainty.
So what happens if banner ads disappear?. I'd be sorely surprised to see the entire Web roll over and close up shop (to mix metaphors rather badly). The very fact that paid ads for free services exist is a tribute to the ability of those who want money to get it from those who have some to spare. And if the money isn't there? Personally, I'm insulted by those who claim that all art and entertainment would dissolve into wisps if they didn't pay big bucks (not that they do now, not on the Web at least). Do these people really think that I put up cartoons about masturbating Chinese food because of the favorable cost/benefit ratio? Sure, I have no problem making money from it, in the same sense that I'd have no problem with being paid to eat tri-tip sandwiches. But the reason I do it is because these things are in my brain and I take sick pleasure in making sure people know it. The same applies to any artist or entertainer worth the name.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
Bruce, I usually respect what you say, but not in this case. What happend to the concept of "fair use"? I never signed any agreement, there is no "bargin" for me to welsh on. They freely put out this content via HTTP to the world, how I view it is my business.
The same can be said about javascript popup ads, does that mean people using LYNX (who do not see these ads) are cheating sites that use them? Perhaps it's time to stamp out this so called browser, seeing as it's only use must be to avoid seeing popup ads (Applying the type of reasoning the MPAA is famous for)
If companies have the right to smack us with ads everytime we turn around (TV, movies, TV movies, telemarketers, spam, cell phone spam, eggs, sausage, and spam, javascript banner ads, billboards, etc) then we should have the right to attempt to avoid these ads if we want to. Fair is fair.
Finkployd
I should have a right to control what I want to view / download in my computer. Nowhere did I sign an agreement saying "You must read all our ads if you want to browse this website".
If you like the ads, click them and be happy, just don't force us to download junk. I skip ads while watching TV, I'd like to do the same for my web experience.
- sigs are for wimps.
...then the ad banner companies will just have to come up with a way to circumvent it. There are many ways.
I could run a cron that downloads images and links to my server, and then display them in a rotation using Perl.
I could use ASP or PHP to open a socket to the ad server, store the ad in a temporary file on my server, and then serve the ad that way... actually, that sounds better than cron/Perl.
The bottom line? I haven't even been thinking about this for 10 minutes and I've already got two plausible ways for ad companies to render the feature irrelevant.
You want to stop ads? Fine. Put up a site that doesn't run any ads and see how much money you can make from other sources. Otherwise, stop whining.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Jamie specifically noted that only one of several developers responded to his queries:
Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.
(Maybe they've never heard of Slashdot?)
This is consistant with several other reports -- I'd also exchanged email with Blake Ross. Two emails (one asking if he'd posted to Kuro5hin) netted a grand total of "that's me :)" in response.
While I haven't seen compelling evidence of skulduggery in this case, Netscape/AOL have been less than forthcoming.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I'm on a cable modem, so I can spare a few k per web pageI download. I don't mind downloading the ads, if it helps support the sites I visit, but I really don't want to *see* them. (I don't click on banner ads, because I don't want to encourage them, just like I *never* buy from or donate to someone who calls me at home because I don't want to get on their 'sucker' list.)
:^)
I wouldn't mind a broswer feature that says "go ahead and download these images, so the pages I read get their hit counts inflated, but just display a transparent gif in its place.
I realize that from the advertisers point of view, this is worse, in a way, because they can't tell how many people are actually viewing their ads, but I don't see how it's any more or less morally reprehensible than tossing my junk mail in the trash without reading it...
Speaking of junk mail - I suspect in the long run, this banner-blocking issue will become moot. Advertising has *always* been like the old spy-vs-spy cartoons: as consumers get more sophisticated at evading ads, the ad agencies just shift their tactics and send you more sophisticated ads - just this week I was fooled into opening a piece of junk mail that looked deceptively like an official bank overdraft notice. [it was an offer for a home equity line of credit 'to pay off those nagging creditors!']
So I say, give people a 'banner hiding' feature instead of a banner'blocking' feature. That way advertisers stay happy [perhaps 'blissfully ignorant' is more accurate] for the short run, web sites continue to get ad revenue which is fairly allocated [i.e. sites which get viewed more still get more ad revenue.], and sit back and wait for the ad agencies to come up with the next generation of sneakier advertising...
Speaking of ads, I know somebody that likes ads. Slashdot! Yellow journalism, here we come. Controversial stories = page impressions.
/etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.
Let's quote something from the 'analysis' appended to the story: I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative
I suspect whoever wrote that needs to get a clue. Seriously, this is sad. This from the same website that says, "We're not anti-corporate! Just some of our commenters are." And they're not, they're chameleonlike. They're skinnable! Slashdot-skins! Just pick the green one, everytime.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
I have nothing against advertising. Infact I prefer to have advertising so I can have my cost effectve web experience. Sometimes I event see an ad I like. Once in a blue moon I see something I might buy. However, there are good adds and bad adds. Good ads load quickly and don't hold my page load hostage. Good ads don't track where I go. In many cases ads can be targeted by targeting a web site rather than by tracking the users. I would prefer to select which advertisers I am willing accept ads from. I don't know if there is such a service but a ratings service for various advertisers would be beneficial. I don't want to welsh on any bargain but there is a limit to what I will put up with. If an advertiser wants me to read their advertising than they should behave within parameters that I find acceptable. If an add hasn't finished downloading witing five seconds on a cable modem then it should be toasted.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!