A Campaign to Block Firefox Users?

rarwes writes "A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.' Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.

Comments

Then screw them....

[jddeluxe]

....don't need their stinking website!

Re:Then screw them....

[kosanovich]

"and it's much more effective than Firefox's Adblock extension."

Please elaborate in what way is it "much more effective"? Is it better at blocking ads? I have been using adblock and have not seen an ad in so long that when i go to another computer who doesn't have it installed i am always surprised by page layouts that i frequently visit.

I like opera too and use it but from your statement i'm wondering if there is something that i could benefit from that you know about opera over firefox, or if it was one of those blanket statements that has no real validity to back it up (if that's the case that's not necessarily a bad thing, after all this is the internet and /. and we all do it from time to time.)

Re:Then screw them....

[Jaysyn]

They also block Maxthon2 (MyIE)

Check this out, someone has went out & registered http://www.whyisfirefoxblocked.com/ to counter thier sillyness.

Has anybody ever actually seen this site?

[jandrese]

I hit a lot of websites and I've never been redirected to this page. Does anybody actually use it, or is it something someone tossed up just to generate flames (AKA a troll)?

Re:AdBlock Block... Blocks The Page!

[eln]

User-Agent switcher should have no problem with this one either. It's "How to block Firefox" page just tells you to put simple code in your page to detect if "firefox" is in the HTTP_USER_AGENT string.

However, I hadn't noticed that this was was blocked in ABP until you mentioned it. I clicked the link, and it failed to load, but I thought it was because these people hadn't tested it in Firefox and it just didn't render. The fact that it didn't appear because ABP blocked it is troubling. I use ABP to get rid of ads, not to get rid of "slander". Why does ABP block a site just because it is critical of ABP? If I'm using ABP, it's because I find it incredibly useful (which I do), and reading some site tell me I'm stealing money from website owners isn't going to make me uninstall it. Learning that ABP is blocking not only ads but also sites that badmouth ABP, though, might.

And I question their claims.

[khasim]

From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.'

I do almost all of my holiday and gift shopping on-line.

On the other hand, I seldom ever click on ads on sites. I shop at on-line stores. I find those stores by searching Google for the items I want.

So, yeah, it probably isn't in your best interest to have me use up your bandwidth to read your opinions on X in the hope that I might click on an ad for Y or Z.

My time is valuable. What are you offering me as incentive to read your ads? Specifically.

Re:And I question their claims.

[LithiumX]

It would help to use proper citation methods, such as author and source. :)

When websites use simple banners or in-content ads, I never have any real problem with it. The exception to that is when the ad itself is far slower than the website calling it - then it chaps my hide.

However, popups drive me nuts. It's annoying, it's extraordinarily rude to their users, and it only serves to amplify the ruthlessness of advertisers - who are starting to demand popups in order to gain advertising revenue. When site advertisements begin to reach that point, it approaches the level of spam.

Regardless, it's the option of the person creating the website. If they want to block users who block popups, that's their right - though there is always a cost, in this case the loss of a stimulating audience that more often than not is either too young to have money to spend, or tend to have quite a bit of expendable cash (since it's usually the intelligent and resourceful who have both the good jobs and the popup blockers). If the goal of the site is to make money (something only cyberhippies seem to dislike), then by all means protect your profits. But if the population violating those ads is truly statistically insignificant, then why care (unless they're eating significant bandwidth)?

If I were in his position, I'd base my assertion purely on popup blockers hiding themselves - which becomes a bit more of a hostile act, no matter how many people (like me) love it. It's purely a circumvention tool, and not one that falls under fair-use since they haven't paid for squat.

Then again, I'd love to be part of any (non-radical) campaign to apply public pressure to some of the more... exuberant... advertisers - not to end web advertising (I enthusiastically embrace capitalism), but to keep it under some sort of realistic control.

Re:And I question their claims.

[Kadin2048]

Just playing devil's advocate here, but what about sites that don't directly sell anything...only distribute/display content? I would think that slashdot would be an example. CowboyNeil's gotta feed his childin's, right?

I have no idea what CowboyNeal / et al actually *would* do if the advertising-supported model collapsed, but they already have a subscription system. It's quite cheap, actually. I tend to read Slashdot a lot, and I have them whitelisted in Adblock Plus and then have the adblocking turned on via my subscription (which seems like a silly thing to do, but that's how I tell when my subscription runs out), and a $5 donation lasts a while.

I don't think it would be a huge stretch to go to a subscribers-only format if the ad model collapsed. It would definitely change the character (and perhaps quality) of Slashdot as a community, and it might not work -- I don't know whether people would pay enough to pay for the bandwidth and maintenance and opportunity cost of the editors time -- but if people value it, they'll pay. If they don't, it will disappear.

(Alternately, there are pay-to-register schemes like MetaFilter's that only charge new users, rather than requiring a continuing membership; this works as long as you have a certain number of new people joining all the time.)

It's easy to look at the advertising business model and assume that's the only way things could work. It's not. However, it seems to be the easiest thing at the moment, so that's what people do. But if it stops working, people will do something else; if there is a demand for content then it will still exist, for those who want to pay for it.

Also, to speak of advertising as the only way to operate the Internet (not that you were saying that, specifically, but it's an attitude that I've encountered a lot) ignores the very long time during which the Internet existed without any advertising on it. There was a lot of content that was developed and put up by people, for free, just because they wanted to do that. Even now, there's probably more ad-free content -- in absolute terms -- than there ever was before (just look at Wikipedia, for instance). Certain parts of the internet probably wouldn't survive, and I suspect a lot of "premium content" (news, stocks, etc.) that take money to publish would retreat into pay-to-access zones, but it wouldn't be the end of the 'net.

Necessity is the mother of invention; as long as people put up with ads, that will be the dominant business model. When people get sick of them and decide to block them in large numbers, a new model will develop for the content that people care about enough to pay for. The only content that will ever disappear is the stuff that nobody wanted anyway (as evidenced by the fact that they're not willing to pay for it).

why block ads anyway

[fastest fascist]

Who needs adblockers anyway? My brain quite successfully filters out all banner ads. I just skip right past them, at most I recall there was a rectangular area on the page I ignored. The ads that pop-up over the content, requiring you to manually close them to continue reading are a bit more annoying, but I find I'm getting pretty good at clicking the close buttons without even seeing what the ad is for.

You see ads if you want to see ads. On the internet, anyway. On TV (not that I watch nowadays), radio (not that I listen to it nowadays) and outdoors (although I try to avoid the centrum nowadays) I find them more annoying.

Adblock will bring a revolution to the commercials

[cyfer2000]

The annoying things will be washed away while the really useful things will flourish. Welcome to the web Ad 2.0.

Re:Some nerve

[TheRaven64]

I don't understand the big deal with ad blocking. Just block sites that abuse their right to advertise by running 'spaz-ads' or other intrusive campaigns, allow other people to provide the services you came there to use. That's exactly what I do. I don't run an ad blocker, but I do have a custom stylesheet. If someone is using irritating advertising techniques (my pet peeve is the ones that turn random words in an article into ads), then the advertising domain is permanently blocked, and any link that points to the site that was showing the ads gets a red warning after it. Unless I really want to see the content on the page, I will avoid clicking on those links, and so not even see the site's nonintrusive adverts.

Re:The other advantages of using Firefox

[Blakey Rat]

Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet manages to pay the bills. Curious...

Slashdot has a few advantages over other sites:

1) It had a large presence before ad-blocking became easy enough for the average user to do.
2) It's extremely targeted, so its advertising space is more valuable.
3) It's part of a large network of other, similarly-targeted, sites which gives it more clout when negotiating sales of ad space.

For a site without those advantages, say one just starting out, people costing bandwidth without contributing ad hits might make the difference between being in the black and being in the red.

Need a "stinking website" blocker

[WebCowboy]

One of the comments on the "block Firefox" page was:

If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more.

To which I'd reply:

* Ad blockers are widely available for IE and many proxy servers as well (which block ads to ALL browsers--our corporate proxy blocks all sorts of content, including nearly all adservers). Yet all these adservers and crappy ad-laden websites continue to exist...unfortunately.

* There are "Thousands of websites" (I'd say MILLIONS actually) that SHOULD be wiped out because their net contribution to the 'net is negative. If ad-blockers give consumers the ability to decide which sites those are then they perform an important public service.

I'd also offer this argument: pushing excessive ads to my computer is theft of my processor time and bandwidth. I pay for my computer and for the monthly internet access so I can use them for what I wish. I am a reasonable person and expect that a lot of content is ad-supported and would find a reasonable amount of advertising to be acceptable. I am used to commercials consuming about 30 percent of TV programming time, and TV has survived on that for a long time. However, in recent times I have found that many sites literally devote MORE THAN HALF of their real-estate to advertising.

The advertising is getting far too distracting as well: I regularly encounter pages with multiple flash and/or video-clip ads, and ads that play sound without asking or warning. Advertisers go out of their way to create workarounds to pop-up blockers and use AJAX, Java and Flash technology to make ads that dance all over your screen, obscure the real content and generally annoy the user as much as possible.

The rights of corporate advertisers must be balanced with the rights of individual consumers, and, sorry to say Mr. Ad Exec, individual rights trump those of corporations. If you wound back a bit and limited your ads to 1/3 screen real-estate or relied on more considerate techniques like interstitial ads that played their message and politely got out of the way so the real content can be enjoyed, then the popularity of ad-blocking would be reduced substantially.

By the way, would you like to know why your precious ad servers are blocked at our corporate proxy, listed right alongside things like myspace and horse porn? It is because they started generating so much traffic on our corporate WAN that the ads actually had a noticeable impact on overall intranet performance. That's right...big, responsible corporations are committing "mass theft" because they are tired of their bandwidth being stolen by aggressive advertisers!

Same old, same old

[MoxFulder]

Political solutions to technical problems... as pathetic and ineffectual as ever :-) What a complete non-starter.

If this "grassroots" Firefox-blocking effort takes off, we'll soon have a Firefox extension to spoof the IE UserAgent on any of the sites that blocks Firefox. Oh wait!!! It already exists, and I'll bet with a little work it could be automated to spoof based on a database of anti-Firefox sites. Of course, all the savvy Firefox users will use this to avoid the block, and only our hapless grandmothers--who don't use Adblock anyway--will be stuck wondering why the Internet doesn't work. And absolutely NOTHING will have been accomplished.

Our interconnected world is increasingly resistant to petty, arbitrary restrictions. Just witness the rise of region-free DVD players, modchips, and third-party ink cartridges... and the ridiculous, heavy-handed responses of the **AA, the game companies, and the printer manufacturers.