Slashdot Mirror
Not Enough Ads? Install Adbar.
An anonymous reader writes "Jesse Ruderman brings the worst feature of Opera, Advertisements, to Firefox with his extension Adbar. According to the page, 'adbar displays Google ads related to pages you view. Because the ads are relevant, they are occasionally useful. When adbar isn't displaying ads from Google, it displays Firefox-related things such as silly Firefox slogans, ads for other Mozilla software, and requests for donations to the Mozilla Foundation.'"
And when I'm done, I need to start installing my virus collection.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
or so shouts Admiral Adbar.
-Rylfaeth
but I've been using gmail for a number of months now, and I'm finding their targeted advertising more and more helpful.
I guess I've officially lost at the internet.
I was worried I wasn't getting enough google ads reading slashdot every 30 minutes. no, but really, thats how sad I am.. I'm on a 30 minute refresh cycle..
ok.. so heads you lose tails I win. right?
When I'm buying a car or appliance, I like seeing ads - I go through all the catalogs and magazines looking for them.
Although, I wouldnt it it as a sidebar on all the time, and I cant imagine internet ads being usefully targetted.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Google is very strict about where they allow their ads to be shown. For example, Google will not feed ads to sites that express extreme political views, or deal with taboo topics such as internet gambling.
So, I'm wondering if they approved this project. If they haven't, then Google will be pulling the plug very shortly...
Internet Explorer?
RTFA.
It's ads are actually GOOD - I've learned to pay attention to them when on Google. I might get this adbar...
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
Sorry, I prefer to keep my [very limited] desktop space.
Thanks anyway!
-Bullseye
Yay Ads! I was feeling guilty about reading pages without watching ads... I was feeling guilty because seeing content without Ads is like stealing from the content makers. You saved my soul.
I find it funny that thats all I got when I first clicked on the article. Atleast this is an optional plugin, but it'd be funny if you ran it alongside Adblock.
I've discovered a remarkable proof, but this margin is too small to contain it...
Out of the FAQ...
"Who gets money?
adbar uses the "test" adsense mode, so advertisers don't pay Google and Google doesn't pay anyone"
Somehow, I sense that Google's going to be pulling thier new test-viewer feature offline for more security to be added tomorrow.
From the site: "Can I register and get rid of the ads? Of course! Paypal $19 (51% cheaper than Opera!) to me or the Mozilla Foundation, then use Firefox's Extension Manager to uninstall adbar." What a waste of a parannoid attack I had there. Thanks slashdot.
meep
I'm going to take a funny stance on this subject. Normally I would be annoyed by this sort of thing, but something occured to me when I read this /. article. Because Adbar is *not* spyware, I'm going to install it. I think people should support advertizing projects that take the high moral road. I'm going to reward these guys for staying legit and we'll see how it turns out. I wouldn't mind Google ads on pages I'm surfing, because there might be cool products or services I can buy related to the stuff I'm looking at. And, no, I'm not affiliated with this project in any way, shape or form, so don't ask! :-)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
What is the point of posting this story? Is it some kind of clever backhand insult to Opera?
I use Opera all the time: number of times I have even noticed the ads consciously... um, never. Or let's say, just about the same number of times I notice them on SlashDot!
Don't install it next to Adblock! The meeting of these two opposing super-extensions will create an implosion that shall engulf the entire universe.
Install AdBar and Adblock and let 'em fight it out...
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Some guy decided to write an extension. It's interesting research -- can ads be made useful enough that people will actively seek them out? It isn't included with Firefox, and it isn't taking up a single byte of your download space. I think that denigrating the guy is going a little bit over the top. He could just as easily say "I'd like to see AssProphet writing some useful open source instead of wasting his time insulting me."
May we never see th
Here on Earth, we call this a "joke".
- These are not the ads you're looking for.
- You can go about your business.
- Move along.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Some TV ads are so funny, you look forward to watching them (until you get sick of them.....WISE.....ER......BUD).
I accept the usefulness and necessity of ads for providing "free" access to some information that would not otherwise be free of direct cost (or even possible) otherwise. This may sound surprising to anyone who has read the About page on my web site, where I diss advertising executives. But that's different. I run a hobby site, just for fun, designed to make people laugh and then go about their lives. I pay for this myself and I don't believe advertising belongs on such Web sites, sites the Web was created for (person-to-person communication, not selling wares). But I don't hate advertising as a whole. I just want to see it kept in its proper place.
And if you can make the ads relevant, interesting, useful, and even fun, it helps a LOT.
It could be made useful if it could target the advertising revenue toward the charity of your choice.
Or alternatively, if looking at enough ads could give you a discount on your broadband bill.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
So based on the assumptions about slashdot users, you will get even MORE ads about "enlarging your member" based on surfing habits.
Take the Superbowl, to use television as an example. People tune in to that event even if they're not football fans just to see the ads. Millions were spent on those thirty second spots, and in a situation like that, millions more get spent on ad agencies to come up with entertaining ads.
As more people learn how to "block" ads on different mediums one way or another, the greater the demand will become to write and produce advertisements entertaining enough that people will want to see them in addition to companies creating several different ads at a time so viewers do not get hit with so much repitition. This Firefox plugin illustrates my points by allowing proud consumers to be informed about what they could spend their money on by filtering out ads that will most likely be of no interest to that Firefox user. This way, if Firefox somehow figures out that you already have a big penis by analyzing your slashdot posts, then you won't be seeing that type of spam. Instead you'll be advised of products that your computer deems worthy for that purpose by judging its relevance to your MO (deduced by Firefox from your web behavior).
If ads could be both very entertaining and minimally invasive, in addition to pushing products/services you'd most likely want to buy in a spontaneous situation, why wouldn't you install this? Not all of us are broke, and most of us want more stuff.
I just invented a reverse TiVo. It extracts all the commercials from a given time slot for viewing at a later date! One at a time folks!
But the eyecandy graphics just sounds like a complete waste. WTF does this do for anybody?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It advertises for mozilla (in mozilla). It advertises things I'm already looking at. Does it advertise itself? I've been searching for this exact set of features! It's like the second coming!
I know more than you drink.
Instead of ads that try to target you all the time, instead the ads should be coralled into a place where they stay until you want to look at them. For example, if I wanted to buy a new fridge then I could go to the ads and look through as many as I want, but the rest of the time they stay suppressed (an ad aggregator of sorts that's not in your face all the time). Ads are useful under certain circumstances. It's my opinion that the current ad process in the browwer doesn't work anymore because people are too accustomed to it. Of course it doesn't work for me (and many of you at all) because of Firefox/Adblock, etc.
Isn't that the same guy who runs Pornzilla?
Ads cost money. Whenever I see an ad for a product or service I automatically think that there must be a competing product that's cheaper. If there's no competitor then why advertise?
I might actually install that if they made so that income generated from selling the ad space went to the mozilla foundation. I'd get to be cheap and financially help out mozilla.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
This is the most retarded thinking ever. This is like saying, I'll support the clips they play in the beginning of movies because they are taking the moral high road. What?
You pay to go see a movie, not to go see a 15 to 30 minutes of ads. It doesn't offset the cost of the movie. The samething for everything else. Advertising, unless it's specific product placement on high traffic sites is useless. Voluntarily subjecting yourself to a barrage of ads is like giving your address to a "direct marketing" unit. Ad's make sense in TV in sports arenas, newspapers, slashdot, google. They simply don't make sense on my desktop, that I pay for, that I pay bandwidth for, that I foot the bill for.
Of course if you're comfortable with the fact that you are footing someone elses bill while having to pay for your own; at detriment to yourself. Then more power to you.
Unlike you, no one is thinking about morals and high roads in the ad industry. This is just another way they can stick a piece of paper, image, video, link in your face. It's business.
Kinda like setting up an Amazon affiliate link on your own page to get a 15% discount on books?
And here the best look for a browser with good shortcuts and tabed browsing(at least for me)
Luxuriousity software, makers of LuxuriousityPhoto and LuxuriousityOffice, have already begun work on a new web browser based on FireFox with Adbar. It will be called LuxuriousityInternetBrowser, and it will be free for download.
> you're just another schmuck who hasn't read the damn article
I did RTFA, and I posted my response to it. The fact they are doing the test thing doesn't bother me. Google will likely make them change servers, so it's kind of a non-issue to me. Their product will move to whatever mechanism works. The fact they say you have to pay to be removed is likely a joke, but even if it isn't, I would rather know that kind of stuff *up front* rather than find out after I've installed something that it won't come off (like Gator). And it's the fact they have designed this project knowing full well that many people won't use it because it's ads, but yet they still branched the advertising medium into something else -- something moral -- I just feel like they deserve to get as many people supporting them as they can. Really, wouldn't you like to see the Internet advertising medium shift gears into something that doesn't hijack your computer? I certainly would.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Do not try to block the ads. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There are no ads. Then you'll see that it is not the ads you block, it is only yourself.
Let's not forget that one can hate his government, but love his country.
The concept is obviously a joke but I can see something like this being a good idea.
People mainly object to ads because of the format in which they're delivered: popups, Flash, spam, etc. People don't have a problem with advertisement-sponsored content itself (well, some do, but fuck 'em).
Well, if we accept that we "pay" for content by exposing our eyeballs to advertisement, wouldn't it be useful to control the way in which we are subjected to adverts? For example, a site could provide meta-data, so to speak, about an ad, and the client will determine how to present it, based on use preference (ie, do you want the ad embedded in the page, or as a popup, or in its own frame, or whatever)
This would be a pretty good concept because it means that advertisement would be delivered to you in a way which you mind the least (or perhaps is the most useful to you)
Just thinking.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
I've recently started to use Adblock with Firefox. Now, not only are all my pop-ups blocked, but I never saw an ad. It seriously took me a week to adjust to actually reading the information in front of me. Before, I'd automatically scan past most pictures and words before reading anything.
Honest to God, it freaked me out. I even mentioned how weird it was to other people. Of course they gave me a weird look by saying all of this, but nevertheless it's true.
as in the Superman movie of 25 (?) years ago, every cigarette pack or banner just happened to say Marlboro. It's happening much more nowadays due to Tivo, by which people skip over commercials, in shows such as American Idol where the contestants are shown in (show sponsor) Ford vehicles.
So it will be impossible to tell where the "entertainment product" ends and the advertisement begins. But there's always been a little of that all along.
Tag lost or not installed.
Yes they are, but sometimes they can provide enough good that they overcome their inherently evil nature (kinda like Angel) -- as long as you don't climb bed with them, then all bets are off.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I always hate to see people actually go for something like this. Advertising is the one industry which provides nothing of value to society. The only ones who gain from advertising are medium to large businesses, as they are the only ones with the investment capital to saturate the market.
That said, if these people can get anyone to fall for this, more power to them. That's capitalism. At least they are up front about it, and not sneaky and underhanded like Gator & the like.
-Amalcon
That and people are stupid enough to actually pay him.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
and block all traffic from *.google.com/* !
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
I'd disagree with #3. It's obviously in the spirit of open source; not only was it made possible by Mozilla's extension support and open source code, it even comes available in 3 flavors of open source licenses.
I'm surprised at all the knee-jerk anti-ad reactions in the comment sections. You don't even need to RTFA to realize this is a piece of sarcastic joke-ware. If I made an extension that fed you pr0n and asked for your credit number every 5 seconds, I'm sure people would be complaining about that, too.
That should be: tied _upside down_ to a tree and fed exlax for a week.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Not to inject some seriousness into this conversation, but why doesn't the Mozilla Foundation release something like this for real? They could set up an account with Google and then get paid for all those clicks on targeted ads. And I know what you're thinking, what kind of an idiot would voluntarily install such a monstrosity as an adbar. But c'mon. You know theres plenty of Google/Mozilla Fanboys out there that would be perfectly willing to whore a couple of pixels out to the Foundation!
If you upgrade from Firefox 0.9.x to a branch nightly build (or wait for Firefox 1.0 Preview Release), middle-clicking and control-clicking the ads will do the right thing.
The shareholder is always right.
My initial plan was to use the MPL. mozilla.org provides a combined MPL/GPL/LGPL boilerplate block, so it's just as easy to tri-license the code as it is to MPL it.
The shareholder is always right.
They're "test ads" in that they don't generate revenue, but they're still loaded from pageads2.googlesyndication.com.
The shareholder is always right.
I'm the author of the adbar extension. I was also one of the first to propose blocking pop-ups, although the method I proposed wasn't very good.
The shareholder is always right.
I have hacked my DVD Player to play 5 minutes of advertisements after every 10 minutes of the movie. And my TIVO plays stored ads even when I watch the premium ad free channels.
Surely Yahoo targeted promotional e-mail, based on keywords in your inbox, can be useful sometimes. Also, I have been hearing about those beneficial worms patching windows holes. Perhaps a firewall plugin is in order.
There is still no way to have a vertical tab bar, quickly toggle on/off all formatting, or quickly cycle between All Images/No Images/Loaded Images.
Also, Opera still has a magical interface. If I misclose a window, I can hit Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Alt+Z and it is magically restored. I don't need to install extensions to get tabs to behave sensically.
And so on.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
You must not have tried Opera. If you pay for the license, you don't get the ads. If you don't want to pay, then you get the ads.
I like Opera enough that I did pay for the license. Actually, two licenses - one for Windows and one for Linux.
Personally, I have no problem with a software package having two modes - 1) free but you put up with advertizing and 2) pay with no advertizing.
If the ads are too annoying, I'll never put up with it long enough to decide whether or not I like it enough to pay for it so that there is no advertizing.
giving people the choice to add ads is pretty interesting... my first thought was "who would willingly expose themselves to extra advertising" but then i remembered some of the magazine junkies i know who buy the publication for the sole reason that they have a good advertiser list...
All the torrents you could want.
If the author was really smart, he/she incorporated banners ads from a pay-per-click plan they signed up for before releasing the plugin
This story is very unfair to Opera. You get ads if you use the fully featured free version of Opera and it even gives you a choice between the types of adverts.
Not all software is free.
I wish I had the same for Mozilla Thunderbird, so I can get more spam...
If they ever come up with a device for my computer that shoves a hot poker in my ass every so often, I'll be in heaven!
Close...
--Dan
I'd hit it, oh wait...
you gotta love it when you see:
*
Luxuriousity Slim
Weight Loss Hypnosis Audio CD
more info
*
advertised next to:
*
Luxuriousity CAD
AutoCAD DXF Compatible
Computer Aided Design Software
(WINDOWS version)
(MAC version)
(CAM Expert Professional Version
*
they have their target audience covered all right!(fat nerds)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Last month I used was in a internet Cafe in Dublin, that used CenturySurf Linux/firfox PCs. The only program they could was Firefox.
I can see someone installing 1000's of public PC's wanting to put ads on them.
who modded this as funny? he did buy the uid on ebay A very little amount of research will also reveal the uid of the user who bought it.
The point is that you can give the extension author $20 and then freely uninstall the AdBar extension anyway.
It's funny. Laugh.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Does no-one in this thread think it's a joke? It appears to be functional, but it is clearly humourous, satirical, ironic - that kind of thing. Hats off to them.
I intentionally set up my Ebay acct with my old /. nick because I did not want to mask the fact that this happened and which nick I used before this transaction.
I feel like I got a good deal on it. I was prepared to go higher than that price.
I've always been a huge fan of Slasdot, and I started coming here when UIDs were about in the 4 digit range, but I never registered then and only posted AC. I bought this acct for my birthday, as the ultimate geek present to myself. My wife looked at me like I was nuts! (She still does)
This acct was originally a beta tester's acct, so I think it's just a cool thing to have and I would never sell it. I'm not sure why anyone would sell their low UID for beer money.
If you look back at my comments, you will see that I have made good use of this acct, and contribute positively to this community. At least a troll didn't get it, right?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Although not obvious, I think this little doosey will dramatically improve Mozillas installed base.
Clone PC makers are always looking for a way to make a few extra bucks on a PC - the fact is by removing IE and replacing it with Mozilla and installing AdBar those PC's will (after a few years) generate more revenue than they made by selling the PC -- this leads to an interesting model of being able to sell computers at near zero cost, or at least to raise their margins.
I would venture to guess that the majority of the computers sold never have their default browsers changed.
So do the community a favor - next time your in a clone shop ask if they install Mozilla by default on all new systems? Then when they say "No" ask "Okay, so whats the catch -- why are you guys leaving money on the table" then they say "huh" then you explain why they ought to be installing Mozilla with AdBar and they'll start getting checks every month from Google.
Ironic isn't it?
Just imagine what would happen to Mozillas #'s if a Compaq or a Dell did that? Even a tier 2 seller like Tiger (who hawks stuff on QVC).
AdBar is an awesome idea, kudos to the author!
Yeah, I realize that the extension is a joke, but something like it would actually be a good idea. If the ad views actually earned money for the Mozilla foundation, people could voluntarily(!) install the adbar as a cashless donation. A lot of people who wouldn't want to pay money for a web browser--even if it's a voluntary donation--may be willing to view ads instead.
It's certainly worth trying, anyway.