How Much Are Ad Servers Slowing the Web?

vipermac writes "Most of the times I have a problem with a Web page loading slow or freezing temporarily, I look down at the status bar and see that it's waiting on an ad server, Google Analytics, or the like. It seems to me that on popular Web sites the bottleneck is overwhelmingly on the ad servers now and not on the servers of the site itself. In my opinion we need a better model for serving ads — or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth. Are there any studies on the delay that 3rd-party ad servers are introducing, or any new models that are being introduced to serve ads?"

Comments

use firefox and adblocker!

[fred fleenblat]

problem solved.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[spyder913]

There are still ads on the internet? I sometimes forget, until I have to open up IE.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Maniac-X]

Or if you like ads (sometimes the google ones are amusing, or you want to support the website you're visiting), turn on HTTP Pipelining. It'll handle all of your requests simultaneously instead of one after the other.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Variorum]

But if you use AdBlock your a thief! At least according to this /. article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/17/135920 6

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[X0563511]

Well then, feel free to call me a rampant kleptomaniac.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[X0563511]

I thought pipelining was when you took one connection and used it for downloading multiple resources, saving bandwith and time on connection re-establishments.

I see what you are getting at though. There is no reason that you should load a websites resources in serial if they span multiple hosts. Not sure why web browsers do that. (making sure that there is only one transfer to/fro a single host makes it easier for the servers to manage their load - lower load over more time rather than spikes of large load)

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[skoaldipper]

Pipelining? So Ted Stevens was right!

By the way, I set pipelining.tube.maxrequests to 128. The googles, they do nothing...

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kleptomaniac? Is the the KDE p2p app?

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Ctrl-Z]

Doesn't that only work if the requests are all made to the same server?

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe HTTP Pipelining would have any effect on third-party ad servers. Pipelining works by sending the requests for information over an open HTTP connection before it finishes receiving the previous response. If the request for the ads is being made to a third-party server, it cannot send the request while it's still receiving unless it's making multiple requests to the same ad server.

Moz will already make simultaneous requests to different servers without any configuration changes.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[GweeDo]

But you will get blocked you theif!

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, we never agreed to having our bandwidth STOLEN by advertisers damit! I pay for my bandwidth so it for me to use as I see fit...not for the advertisers to use up as they see fit. So why do they think it's so damn harmless to do that? Do they really have no life that they think we want to see all this advertising shit!!??!! Just like when the ads come across the radio, I can change the damn station so fast I never have to listen to them, or I just turn it off. I pay for cable too, to get content, but I don't want to pay for ads by having to watch them too. I just love my MythTV Box!

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Cramer]

More often than not, this makes no difference. The browser cannot (or won't) render the page until it has all the elements. Sites that care about this sort of issue put the ads inside iframe's. But even that doesn't always work.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. su [admin]
2. sudo vi /etc/hosts
3. add 127.0.0.1 www.block.this.site to it.
4. sudo lookupd -flushcache
5. ???
6. no profit for adservers.

Block the adservers at the host level, I say. That way they stay blocked regardless the softwares being used.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[dgatwood]

You mean some browsers serialize that? My browser appears to fetch multiple hosts concurrently.... Unfortunately, it still won't render the page with certain missing content (e.g. slow-loading javascript crap from ad servers).

As a result of this I have a policy: if it takes more than ten seconds longer than expected to load a page, I look at the activity window, figure out which requests are stalled, and create my own zone record on my local DNS server to block the entire offending domain. You don't get a second chance. As a result, I have about a dozen ad servers on my list whose contents I will never see again. Oh, yeah, and IntelliTXT just because their ad links annoy the living **** out of me.

Ads on the side of a page don't bother me that much as long as I can ignore them. The second they become intrusive, either through sound, motion, blocking parts of the page with a pop-over, causing the page to take an unreasonable amount of time to load, or gluing your own advertisement links into the text content of a page, though, I find myself vowing never to give business to the offending companies again and blocking the ad service if at all possible. Maybe someday advertisers will learn that the extra views they get aren't worth the ill will they generate.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[PitaBred]

They are worth it, though. The mouth-breathing morons who can't block ads like we do are the types to click on the ads or punch the monkey. I consider annoying ads a "tax" for people who can't be bothered to educate themselves marginally about the exceptionally complex system they want information from.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[CastrTroy]

According to the HTTP 1.1 RFC, you're allowed to have 2 connections open to any 1 webserver (public facing IP). This is the way most browsers are configured by default. So there shouldn't be any problems with a user opening too many connections to your website. If they are, they are breaking the standard and deserve to get kicked. I also agree though, that if there is content coming from multiple servers, the browser should do it's best to try to download from all those servers simultaneously.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Kadin2048]

You mean some browsers serialize that? My browser appears to fetch multiple hosts concurrently.... Unfortunately, it still won't render the page with certain missing content (e.g. slow-loading javascript crap from ad servers). Well, the RFCs only allow 2 connections per client to one webserver; any more is considered abusive. And to support some older webservers, most browsers only get one page element per connection. So they open a connection, send one GET request, let the server respond, close the connection ... rinse, repeat.

This was OK on narrowband/dialup connections (in fact, most browsers used to render the page between elements by default, so that it would show you the whole page, then re-render as various images or other elements were downloaded and ready to display -- although as connections got faster relative to rendering time, most browsers switched to only rendering the page once when it was complete), but it sucks on broadband. As the amount of time each data transfer takes drops relative to the time required to establish the connection, the establishment and resetting of the connections for each page element becomes more "expensive."

So in HTTP/1.1 they introduced a way of making multiple requests in one connection. (It may have predated HTTP/1.1 but I think that was when it was first formalized). Basically the web browser opens a connection to the server and make multiple requests at once. Then the server will respond with all the requested elements. Then the connection will close. This is considered kosher and non-abusive because it doesn't require spawning a whole lot of connections at the server; everything is done in one.

However this isn't enabled in default in Firefox; you have to go into the about:config page and turn it on, and set the number of requests per connection to something reasonable (I think 8 is the max).

Also, it requires a certain amount of intelligence on the part of the browser to do this correctly. There are certain kinds of requests that shouldn't be pipelined (PUT requests, for instance), and some older servers may not like it. However, I think we're moving pretty quickly towards a time where it can be made the default.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[ttfkam]

So in HTTP/1.1 they introduced a way of making multiple requests in one connection. (It may have predated HTTP/1.1 but I think that was when it was first formalized). Close. It was possible to make multiple requests per connection in even the HTTP 1.0 spec. HTTP 1.1 simply made that behavior the default. In other words, you had to specify an additional header to support multiple requests in 1.0, but in 1.1 you had to specify "Connection: close" to prevent the behavior.

Good introductory overview in general. Kudos.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[don_bear_wilkinson]

My copy of Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Win32 shows:

network.http.max-connections - 24
network.http.max-connections-per-server - 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server - 2

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[mr_walrus]

>According to the HTTP 1.1 RFC, you're allowed to have 2 connections open to any 1 webserver (public facing IP).
>This is the way most browsers are configured by default.

except ads are usually served by OTHER servers than the site you are actually trying to view.

so the limit of 2 connections can be effectively ignored if you concurrently open all the external sources
referenced on a visited page. (well, of course, no more than 2 connections per externally referenced
server :)

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Kadin2048]

Humm. I would have thought that "network.http.max-connections-per-server - 8" would violate the RFCs, but I admit to not having read the RFC in question so maybe it only cares about the number of persistent connections at once, which is what's limited to 2 at a time. I wouldn't imagine that FF by default would blow the limit by that much. (And it's the number of persistent connections to the server that would really be important; if you started opening and keeping open dozens of connections per client, things would start to get messy.)

But at any rate, the number of maximum independent HTTP connections is different than HTTP pipelining; what the network.http.max-connections-per-server is doing, is letting the browser grab several page elements at the same time, but doing it through separate connections. Pipelining is getting multiple page elements in one TCP connection, by stacking them up.

Anyway, if you go into Firefox and want to do pipelining, what you have to change isn't the network.http.max-connections, but network.http.pipelining (set to true, default is false), network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (I have it set to 8, but you could set it to some smaller value), and network.http.proxy.pipelining (again to true). The last one is really only important if you want to use pipelining through a proxy server.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[dgatwood]

Well, the RFCs only allow 2 connections per client to one webserver; any more is considered abusive.

I said from multiple hosts concurrently, not from the same host. That's what it sounded like they were talking about. Maybe I misread the previous post. It definitely didn't sound like they were talking about HTTP keep-alive.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[rapidweather]

As a quick test, I unchecked Javascript in the preferences, and then clicked on some common news web sites. Seems to speed up the loading of the page quite a bit. I'm not missing anything, the content I wanted, shown in RSS feeds in Firefox, is shown.
I can't use Adblocker since I have to restart Firefox to get it to work, and my
Security and Control script will just delete ~/.mozilla when I close Firefox. That would remove the extension.
I can run Firefox without the S&C script, but would have to configure all of the preferences, add some extensions, then on the next startup, use the menu item to run Firefox w/o the S&C active, rather than the toolbar icon for Firefox, which would use the S&C setup. If that's used, my custom-made ~/.mozilla gets deleted at browser startup, then any ~/.mozilla made while running Firefox gets deleted once again as Firefox is closed. Saves /ramdisk memory for those running off the CD.
I do find it somewhat reassuring to automatically remove the ~/.mozilla in the system when Firefox is closed, especially after visiting sites requiring usernames and passwords, such as online banking, bill paying, and the like.
I don't have any extensions for Firefox enabled by default in my knoppix remaster, screenshots below:

Rapidweather

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[msmiffy]

Thank you for this - I've learned something new. For those looking for the parameter, it is: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests My default was set at 4.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[totally bogus dude]

I think it's more a problem with JavaScript and CSS -- particular JavaScript. If you're including an external JS file (via <script src=...>) then it's quite possible that that script will want to change the document's onLoad behaviour, or refer to a variable or function that was defined in a different script which was included earlier ... which means you can't complete loading the document until all the JavaScript files have been loaded. A lot of the advertising uses JS included in separate script files; and heavy (aka bloated) sites are likely to have their own scripting separated into multiple files, too.

CSS has a similar problem; styles defined after other ones take precedence (at least, I think that's the case -- I could be making it up), therefore they need to be parsed in order. At the very least, you need to have all of the stylesheets parsed before you can work out what the layout is supposed to be. Although, I have noticed some sites are temporarily displayed without styling, particularly on my N800 (Opera).

I think a lot of browsers meet these requirements by simply loading the docs one at a time, in order. Simpler to program, but potentially less efficient. Regardless, if one of the servers hosting a JS file you need is slow, then you don't really have much choice but to wait for it.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[wolfperson1]

By their reasoning, television companies should also block TiVo and other like DVRs. I know I always start TV shows twenty-minutes late so we can skip past the commercials. Must be another one of those rampant kleptomaniacs. No only that, I'm encouraging more rampant kleptomaniacs: I just converted someone to Firefox with Adblock today. They were seeing an increase in annoying talking banner ads which interrupted the music they were listening to every time they loaded the page. Blocking ads like that should be considered a public service.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[ajs318]

Can't the server operator just put some directive in their httpd.conf to limit the maximum number of concurrent connections per client, if they really think more than two is taking the piss?

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[ajs318]

Quicker way:

$ sudo echo "127.0.0.1 www.block.this.site" >> /etc/hosts

No need to muck about with vi. (If you do want to advise people to use vi, it's good form then to tell them the exact keystrokes they will need. Some people aren't as smart or brave as the secretaries who used to work for AT&T, and do actually get put off by a screenful of tildes, a beep every time they press a key and no obvious way out. So: shift+G to Go to the end of the file; a to enter append mode; type the extra line; ESC to get out of {or escape from} append mode; shift+Z, shift+Z to save and exit {go to sleep ZZ}.)

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be naive, but I barely go to sites that are so ad flooded in a way that i feel forces me to install an ad blocker. I am not a click monkey (although I admit I may have clicked about 10-15 ads in the last 7 years). The problem is that it is all too common here in slashdot for a person to consider himself better because he is using program X while another group doesn't.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[v1]

But isn't that like saying if you don't look at the bilboard as you drive down the highway, or at the ad poster on the subway, or walk into the kitchen for a snack during the commercial break, that you're a theif? The television example is probably the best and easiest to associate with.

Advertisements are an opportunity to make an impression on a customer. While there will always be technologies that make it difficult to ignore the ad, in most cases you are not obligated to be impressioned. Just because the advertisers get upset that you are stealing the cheese from their trap, it's your prerogative.

I'm a little surprised that we don't see more "banner" ads on TV. Imagine all these people with the widescreen sets that are viewing content with black sides because it's 4x3 formatted instead of widescreen. Imagine banners on both of those dead zones on the sides, that change every 20-30 seconds and adjust their product to something related to the main feature. Y know I think I would prefer that to the "four miniutes of commercials every 10 minutes" we get now. Also, even though a lot of shows are timed for like 49 minutes for the hour to accomodate commercials, a lot of stations trim out scenes or cut them short to insert more ads, so we would be getting more content. I wouldn't mind them doing this so long as they were not animated. Sort of like how I can't stand the animated shockwave banners here and at other sites. I don't understand why no one is doing this already. Though I have seen a few isolated examples of banner ads being shot across the bottom of the screen briefly during some shows - those are overlays though and degrade the content so maybe that's why those have been unsuccessful.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Jaseoldboss]

I've already clicked on a couple of sponsored links today whilst I was using Google. Unobtrusive targetted ads like these are actually useful IMHO.

As for the floating annoying flash ones, I block their servers at my router to save everyone in our house the grief of having to endure them.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's useless. The maximum is 8.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[tobiah]

I adblock ad sites that are persistently slow or serve up exceptionally annoying ads like pop-unders, strobe-flash, and monkey-punchers. It's not so much a theft thing as a Darwinian thing, I block the ad because it's obstructing content, and I had to sit there for 10seconds too long with nothing better to do than add it to adblock. If I couldn't block those ads, I would likely avoid the sites that host them altogether. Presumably the site would prefer I block their most annoying ads over losing my participation. They still get to include me when they report the number of visitors to the advertisers.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Stan92057]

Hmmmmm,I use IE and i don't see any ads. Matter of fact Ive had an ad free IE long before no ads was an option on foxfire. This is what i am using now,its very good. http://www.ie7pro.com/

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[kcbanner]

Sssshhhhhhhh...they will do it now!

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Zaffle]

Quicker way:

        $ sudo echo "127.0.0.1 www.block.this.site" >> /etc/hosts

Nice idea, but you need to hand in your geek card.
Short answer: That command fails with permission denied

Why?
Because sudo runs the specified command with root priviledges. The command specified is echo "blah blah", this is run as root. The output is appended, using your *CURRENT* priviledges, to /etc/hosts.

The command you want is:

sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 www.block.this.site" >> /etc/hosts'

Sheesh

[Verteiron]

"Nothing for you to see here. Move along."

Must be 'cause I'm using Firefox...

Overstating the obvious

[pedramnavid]

Who cares about ads when you have adblock?

Like slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I probably would have had first post if slashdot did not serve up so many ads!!

Jokes aside, I do notice waiting for ads on slashdot quite often but it is one of the few sites that I allow more to get through.

Browser's fault?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

I realize this means performing some speculative page layout that may need to be re-done when the dimensions of the ads are served. But it sure would beat waiting tens of seconds to see the page's real content.

Re:Browser's fault?

[ePhil_One]

Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

I've always assumed this was intentional, to buy the add more "eyeballs", or awareness, or whatever. Server teh add, wait 3 seconds, load the rest of the page. Make sure they get a good look at that ad...

Re:Browser's fault?

[Shados]

Its actually stupidly easy. I have a lot of business data driven web apps that do some heavy data mining and display them as charts, and obviously, that can be pretty slow if the customer wants their data real time (so no heavy caching allowed), so I simply render everything -else- first, then display the graphs and charts as they are rendered. I don't remember exactly how many lines of code it takes to do that, but it fits in one screen, thats for sure.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

It depends how the ad is served. If it's served as an external piece of JavaScript (using a script element), then most browsers will reach the script tag and won't render anything else until the script has been downloaded. This can cause a delay if the ad server is slow or down.

If the ad is served using an img, iframe or object element, you generally don't have this problem, as the browser can leave a space for the advert and carry on rendering the rest of the page.

I work for an ad serving company and most of the ads we serve are in iframe elements. The growing popularity of script elements (they seem to be used for most third-party ads now) confounds me. Generally, I'm continually surprised at how much control over the user experience most websites are willing to give to ad serving companies.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the site uses tables. No rendering engine will draw the full table if the first part(s) are lagging.

So anyone who puts a "lazy" ad up top will force people to see it before the rest of the page. That's probably the biggest reason to push for CSS DIVs.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about taking care of everything coming off the real server's domain first, and then and only then, go ahead and contact the servers on the third-party domains?

Re:Browser's fault?

[pedramnavid]

I work for an ad serving company and

release the hounds.

Re:Browser's fault?

[dpu]

Another option is to use the "DEFER" option in the script tag. Any script within the tags will wait until the page loads before executing. I wish ad companies would start using that *sigh*

Re:Browser's fault?

[vjmurphy]

The defer attribute of the script tag should help with those Javascript-delivered ads, I'd think.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Shados]

They don't want to, obviously, because you may end up going away from the page (cuz you realised it wasnt the right one) before the ad loads, unfortunately.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll push for CSS DIVs when I can use them to make a table (hint: CSS's new box model is utterly broken without the ability to specify or obtain the outer size of the box, I'd rather deal with quirks mode than have data tables that I cannot line up). Hell, the table tag is barely capable of it, as long as you're fine with the browser rendering the table differently every single time you look at it. God forbid you have an empty cell, and if the browser is going to load the entire table before rendering it, why not give me the ability to set the width of a column to the width of the widest cell, instead of setting it to 50px and praying nobody changes their font size, or 20% and having an enormous chunk of white space just for a single digit number.

Re:Browser's fault?

[brunascle]

this is especially bad in IE because, IIRC, IE doesnt display a table unless it can display the whole table. and many sites put all of the content inside one giant table for layout purposes.

Re:Browser's fault?

[FireFury03]

Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

Most ad systems seem to work by placing a <script> tag where you want the ad to appear which loads a script from the ad server that does a document.write() to insert the actual code. This is very bad practice (and explicitly disallowed for XHTML) but even Google do it (which sucks since I have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get AdSense to work on my XHTML site).

document.write() works by actually writing out HTML and feeding it into the parser and thus parsing the page must be suspended at that point until it's finished executing, so you can't render the page until the advert has loaded.

The _correct_ way to do this is for the ad-serving Javascript to actually modify the DOM tree. But that requires the ad server developers to not be lazy and have clue, which seems to be asking too much. (or alternatively, don't use Javascript at all).

Re:Browser's fault?

[brunascle]

that sounds like it would be a problem for ad scripts, which generally use document.write(). if the scripts executed after the page loaded, i imagine the ad would either be at the bottom of the page or would overwrite the whole page.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Noscript will help more.

Re:Browser's fault?

[ZachPruckowski]

I just want to briefly say that "screenful of code" and "Stupidly easy" are antonyms, not synonyms, in this day and age. Since many sites are run by people for whom HTML is a challenge and Javascript latin (people who install Wordpress/Movable Type/whatever), these sorts of problems go unsolved.

I'm not flaming bloggers by saying (or at least not intentionally). What I mean is that the bar for web publication has been lowered (and by and large it's a good thing, too) so that anyone with more than basic computer skills can get a blog. On the whole, this is great for the web, the Marketplace of Ideas, and society at large, but it does result in problems like this. Specifically, website creators delegate the idea of working out the details of the ads to the ad-provider, and just copy-paste in the ad code. Admittedly, if I had a blog (and I may get one soon), I'd probably start out doing the same thing until I felt more comfortable with the HTML/CSS/JS required.

Re:Browser's fault?

[jollyreaper]

>> I work for an ad serving company and

> release the hounds.

Jesus, is your last name Vick? I try to be careful about what my dogs eat.

Re:Browser's fault?

[forkazoo]

I work for an ad serving company and most of the ads we serve are in iframe elements. The growing popularity of script elements (they seem to be used for most third-party ads now) confounds me. Generally, I'm continually surprised at how much control over the user experience most websites are willing to give to ad serving companies.

One curious perk of the popularity of script advertising is that by using noscript, I'm often unaware of ads that are supposed to be on a page. It isn't that I'm fanatical about blocking ads. I mean, I don't particularly like them. I'm much more fanatical about hating Javascript! Consequently, I'll occasionally hear people complain about the ads on a particular site, and simply be confused because even though I don't do anything to block the ads, I never even knew I was missing out on them.

Re:Browser's fault?

[prockcore]

They don't want to, obviously, because you may end up going away from the page (cuz you realised it wasnt the right one) before the ad loads, unfortunately.

Actually, that's the opposite of what most websites want. It makes their clickthru rates look really bad if they're counting ad impressions that aren't actually impressions.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Shados]

Good point. When I posted that, I had in mind the typical mainstream sites, like news web sites, this very one, etc. Web sites made by professionals. Even blog web sites tend to have a few software engineers behind em, the bloggers don't make the engine.

Don't see THAT many ad driven web site made in MS Word these days...

Re:Browser's fault?

[jrothwell97]

I work for an ad serving company

I would advise against saying that. I've got an AK47 and some cyanide. ;)

Re:Browser's fault?

[dpu]

Not an issue. The script still appears in the same place in the source document, but actual execution is delayed until the site content is fully loaded from the server. This won't affect the location of the ads at all - but it will speed the page up, especially if the ad server sucks (as most seem to).

Re:Browser's fault?

[rmezzari]

"I work for an ad serving company"

So you are really getting a kick out of these replies?

Re:Browser's fault?

[jzeejunk]

bad idea i think. infact they might use the defer for the actual content and no defer (or prefer tag if it exists) for the ads

Re:Browser's fault?

[ZachPruckowski]

Even blog web sites tend to have a few software engineers behind em, the bloggers don't make the engine.

Wordpress.com or Blogger.com have software engineers behind them, but Joe Blogger who rents a $10 virtual server and a TB of bandwidth from $HOSTING_PROVIDER (there are at least 5 with similar plans) and then follows the WP or Drupal install directions, is probably at his limit setting the default font to purple. He uses easy-to-install modules to meet his needs, and his ads come from copy-paste of code from the ad provider. Same goes for some people who run vBulletin or SMF forums. It takes minimal technical skill to run one, which is a good thing, but which has some results like this from time to time.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Illogical Spock]

But it sure would beat waiting tens of seconds to see the page's real content.

But in most cases the pages real content is formed by the ads itself. The rest is only a way to make you see the ads...

Re:Browser's fault?

[mpcooke3]

Ironically half the script based 'ad-tags' that slow page loading just dynamically write out an iframe style advert.

Possibly this is because some publisher sites don't like accepting iframe style ads because they think it is "old html" - which in a way it is.

Using a script tag to render the iframe tricks most people and most 'pre-rendering' based HTML validators to pass the adtag as valid XHTML/HTML. The only down side is that it is still actually invalid, it slows down the publisher site as it is synronously called every page hit and occasionally makes the publisher site entirely unuseable if the adserver becomes unavailable.

But ultimately after a lot of ranting one usually gives people what they want even if it isn't good for them, because time is short and it is *their* site they are screwing up after all.

Re:Browser's fault?

[jhaygood86]

I work for a rich media vendor (basically, middle men between ad agencies and website publishers for rich media advertisements), and we reduce our impact on page load time by using fast edge servers via a content delivery network to serve our JavaScript file, whether on the page or on the ad server's iframe, and then not load content until after the page is finished loading. Seems to work pretty well, as we recieve very few complaints from most of our publishers (including Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and even Slashdot itself)

Re:Browser's fault?

[bluelan]

If page designers were very careful, the tag could be inserted dynamically by js, allowing the entire page to render before rendering the ad. See YSlow. The JS that inserts the script advertisements should be placed at the bottom of the page so it won't block rendering.

Re:Browser's fault?

[jgc7]

Last time I checked, modifying the dom tree is typically slower than document.write or innerHTML. Document.write/innerHTML leverages the power of the C/C++ html parsing engine. Firefox is fast in either case, IE 6 DOM methods suck.

The problem with ads is generally not the javascript execution time, but the ad server response time. Some ad servers require 5+ connections because they use redirection and CDNs.

Re:Browser's fault?

[bluelan]

Oh, and if the script uses document.write (), you'll have to dynamically create a new IFRAME definition that contains that script, then glue the iframe into your dom, so the script has its own document to play with.

Re:Browser's fault?

[FireFury03]

Last time I checked, modifying the dom tree is typically slower than document.write or innerHTML

Quite probably. But it is still many orders of magnitude faster than waiting for the script to load from a slow server. There are 2 methods which could be used:

document.write():
1. Start parsing/rendering the page
2. Reach the script tag
3. Suspend parsing/rendering
4. Request the script
5. wait
6. Execute the script, which uses document.write() to insert some HTML at the current position in the document
7. Resume parsing/rendering
8. Done

Modifying the DOM tree:
1. Start parsing/rendering the page
2. Finish parsing/rendering
3. Request the script
4. wait
5. Execute the script, which mangles the DOM tree
6. Re-render the page
7. Done

In the document.write() case, most of the page isn't rendered until step (7) has completed - so you had to wait for the script to be received and executed before you could see the content. In the second case, everything except the ads has been displayed by step (2) and you can sit there browsing the page while it's trying to download the script.

The problem with ads is generally not the javascript execution time, but the ad server response time.

The problem is not the JavaScript execution time - the problem is the order of the critical path. If you use document.write(), much of the document can't be parsed and rendered until the script has been fetched and executed, whereas if your script modifies the DOM tree, it can be fetched at the end and therefore the page can be rendered before the script has been fetched.

As with most critical path planning, it is beneficial to do the important stuff first (getting the page into a readable state) and leave the less important stuff until the end (loading the ads and other relatively unimportant scripts), even if it might take marginally longer.

Re:Browser's fault?

[petermgreen]

As with most critical path planning, it is beneficial to do the important stuff first (getting the page into a readable state) and leave the less important stuff until the end (loading the ads and other relatively unimportant scripts), even if it might take marginally longer.
I guess that depends on what you think is most important. I'd imagine advertising agencies consider thier adverts one of the most important things on the page.

Re:Browser's fault?

[jgc7]

I think you are confusing the method used to manipulated the DOM with when the script is run. You know you can just put the ad code at the end of the html. Right before you run the ad code is run, move your element where ever your want. I fault the site developers, not the javascript that serves the ad. Go read the last 3 lines of html, at Digg.com and you will understand what I mean. (Sorry for using Digg as a referencce, I just happened to remember it was a site where the ads load after the page load)

As with most critical path planning, it is beneficial to do the important stuff first (getting the page into a readable state) and leave the less important stuff until the end (loading the ads and other relatively unimportant scripts), even if it might take marginally longer.

I couldn't agree more. I don't understand why developers have to be idiots and put the ad code in the middle of the content.

Re:Browser's fault?

[FireFury03]

I guess that depends on what you think is most important. I'd imagine advertising agencies consider thier adverts one of the most important things on the page.

I'm sure they do. However, the ad agencies also think that it's important to have exceptionally annoying and distracting adverts and this behaviour is leading to people blocking the ads. If the advertising agencies want people to actually see their ads they will have to go some way to respecting the end-user's preferences as well as their own.

Re:Browser's fault?

[FireFury03]

I think you are confusing the method used to manipulated the DOM with when the script is run.

The two are quite strictly linked - document.write() is required to be executed at load time and inserts the code after the script tag where it is called, whereas updating the DOM tree itself can be done after the page has finished loading.

You know you can just put the ad code at the end of the html. Right before you run the ad code is run, move your element where ever your want.

Moving elements after they have been parsed into the DOM tree constitutes "altering the DOM tree" so my point still stands - the correct method of implementing ads is to load them at the end of the document and insert them into the DOM tree.

I don't understand why developers have to be idiots and put the ad code in the middle of the content.

Because that's what the ad agencies tell them to do. If you sign up to something like AdSense you get handed some code and told "paste this where you want the ad to appear" (or words to that effect). Ignoring what the advertiser tells you to do, sticking the code at the end and hacking up some code to mangle the DOM tree to move the ads to where you want them takes clue, and clue seems to be one thing a good proportion of web developers are missing.

I don't understand why the ad agencies can't just ask you to insert an <object> tag pointing at their ad server - they can work out all they need to know by looking at the GET request and the referrer header, no need for javascript in the main page to generate all the necessary elements.

I still really wish people would stop using document.write() though - it makes it impossible to validate the compliance of the whole page and is completely incompatible with XHTML. I end up having to call a HTML 4.01 page inside an <object> tag in my XHTML 1.1 pages in order to get AdSense to work.

Re:Browser's fault?

[jgc7]

I think we have beaten this into the ground. Frankly, I don't think there should be any javascript at all. The code they give you should just be an iframe. That way, the contents of the page are protected from the advertiser by cross domain policy. The whole reason they use javascript is so they can read/write cookies on your domain and do other questionable things.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Blakey Rat]

It's labeled as "optional" in the HTML specs, and Firefox seems to not support it at all. For IE, it might be a valid solution, but it's no good for other browsers.

Re:Browser's fault?

[ajs318]

I work for an ad serving company

Please be so kind as to let us know the hostnames of all your ad-servers. Details of what software (and which specific versions) they are running would be an added bonus, as would the physical location of the building in which they are kept and the times when it is staffed.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Cadrys]

Akamai. HTH, HAND.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed so hard at that. Thank you.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Kalriath]

You aren't responsible for the atrocity of sites like IGN are you?

If you ask me, all "rich media" ads need to be banned and the people responsible forcibly removed from the gene pool.

0 slowdown for me

[jandrese]

For the reasons mentioned in the op I have several notorious slow adservers in my /etc/hosts. I don't know if they're still a problem, but doubleclick used to be horrible about taking 10 or 15 seconds to get their ad bits back to you. I'm not even particularly zealous about killing ads, but if you're stalling out my webpage then it's in /etc/hosts for you.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[i.r.id10t]

Out of curiosity, do you point to 0.0.0.0 on the hosts you add, or to localhost, or something else?

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to share that list for the rest of us to add to our own hosts file?

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

If you're interested in populating your hosts file, check out http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm. There's a downloadable hosts file that's 406k, and was updated on July 31st, 2007. If you're running 2000/XP/Vista, be sure to read the Editor's Note about steps you must take to use a large hosts file.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[X0563511]

Best to direct it to a local address that will explicitly deny the connection (rather than just time-out as "cloaked" ports do)

usually 'localhost' - which if course resolves to 127.0.0.1 works, unless you are running a webserver on your host - then things cna get funny!

Or you could be a jackass and set it to a broadcast address on your subnet, like 192.168.1.255 and be amused if the web browser actually follows through with it.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[xaxa]

Speed hasn't annoyed me enough to block anything yet, but ad servers sending content with a MIME type of text/plain did -- in Konqueror (at least, until I changed the option) every IFRAME with "text/plain" content brought up the "Save or open?" box, I have

127.0.0.1 ad.adserverplus.com ads.ak.facebook.com

since they were the main offenders. Since finding the appropriate setting in Konqueror I've not had this problem, I just get IFRAMES showing script .... most of the time.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

The problem with these big hosts list files are you don't know specifically whats been added and cannot reliably tell whether a server is not responding because of a host hit or a broken server.

When I find a slow ad site I add that single ad specific site to my blocked hosts.

I have a custom list of about 40 ad specific sites added at the moment and that generally handles it.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

Additional to my note, looking through the specific host file you reference I see it blocks a load of porn sites.

These are wanted and are not crappy adverts

ahem..

Re:0 slowdown for me

[jandrese]

I have a webserver running locally on my box so they come back real quick with 404 pages. :) I'm not sure if that is really the best solution, but it seems to work for me.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[mrbcs]

I just did this and it works very well.

Thanks for the heads up!

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Carnildo]

I use localhost, which means my private webserver returns a 404 right quick.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

I used to run a custom host file, but it got tedious having to update every time I ran across a new ad site. With the linked host file, all the work's done for me-- and I can easily download and install it on friend/family computers.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

Those could very well be porn sites that'll deliver more than just pictures of naked people to your computer.

But hey, if you enjoy virus-laden sex, then I'm sure you'll find lots of dirty, dirty places to send your header requests to...

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

I understand the principle and in some situations it might work, but the shotgun approach just makes people think half the net isn't working. When I tried one of these large files I was forever going in and removing hosts after realising they weren't dead because of the slashdot effect (or similar) but were infact blocked in hosts.

I also find it tedious to update the hosts file, so have on numerous occasions considered (and half implemented) a firefox addin which lists the servers used on a particular page as a tick list allowing a quick simple selection and automatic insertion into the local hosts file.

Unfortunately my java skills are weak and hence it remains as an idea rather than a finished addin.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[houghi]

Obviously you are not the only one. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt has a lot servers. I just do an update each month. If you have a webserver, you can configure it in such a way that it gives a nice warning or whatever you desire. Comes in handy with embedded frames.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

Viruses mainly come from insecure browsers and user stupidity.

The biggest (solvable) problem with porn (and other) sites is link/statusbar hijacking where you click one link and are redirected to another site not related.

The solution involves preventing access to the statusbar and unfolding the links (with a greasemonkey script).

I will not click anything which I cannot see the resultant page.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[thomas.galvin]

I'm not even particularly zealous about killing ads, but if you're stalling out my webpage then it's in /etc/hosts for you.

Agreed. For the most part, I'm happy to let ads load, but there are four things that will get you added to my killfile real quick:

* Boobies (or anything else that might get me fired)
* Shaking, flashing, screen grabbing, "look at me!" type stuff
* Fake dialogs and error messages
* Slowdown

I just started filtering for the last one recently. For about a week straight I kept seeing "waiting for ads.doubleclick.so.goram.slow" in my status bar, and eventually I just adblocked their entire domain.

Also, slashcode is apparently unable to figure out what to do with ul and li tags.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[DigitalCrackPipe]

Using the hosts file and noscript, I have greatly reduced this problem as well. Noscript prevents the unknown new players from hijacking your CPU and running javascript (malicious or just annoying). I've had java disabled for years due to the historic prevalence of using java to peg your CPU for 10 seconds to load an ad popup (back in the day...)

Re:0 slowdown for me

[mr_mischief]

I hope you either rotate your logs often or don't log 404 errors.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Pope]

The only ones I've found that are pretty slow are the Flash ones, which I've since taken care of in FireFox by either killing the plugin altogether or running FlashBlock.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

You're welcome. Glad it helped.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

I've considered the same thing, especially after looking through the much more informative Mozilla "Page Info".

But then I realized there already was an extension that displays all the servers accessed on a page and gives you a GUI interface to block them. Ad Block. And it does wildcards to boot.

The downside is that if I ever have to open up a page in IE (blech) then the ads aren't blocked. Of course, I would only open up a very, very trusted page in IE, so it shouldn't be crap-ad ladened anyways.

Maybe they could put this in the next revision of Ad Block. When you block a site, it gives you the option to add the server to the host file (but only that server, since hosts.txt doesn't do wildcards)

I think I only ever one had an issue with a page no loading due to hosts, and that was when I tried to click on a "sponsored link" through Google. (Yes, I once tried to do that, when looking for a ballpark price on something). It didn't work, because the Google link tries to first go to an ad tracker. So instead, I just copy and pasted the URL listed in the search result, and it worked.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Hatta]

What kind of browsing are you doing? I use one and I don't think I've ever had a false positive. If I have it's not on any site I'm going to miss.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[dkf]

For the most part, I'm happy to let ads load, but there are four things that will get you added to my killfile real quick:

• Boobies (or anything else that might get me fired)

You mean a link like this would be unacceptable to your employer? Is it the fact that the subject is not wearing any clothes?

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

Have you ever clicked on any link and had the server dead?
How do you know the difference between dead because its off the internet or dead because of your host list?

I hate not knowing and spent more time faffing about trying to find out that eventually I gave up.

Its like a spam filter, I have a spam folder containing every single spam I have received and have trained my filter to recognise and handle it but I hate mail systems which silently eat spam without even letting me get at it (ISP|domain level).

Re:0 slowdown for me

[gad_zuki!]

Thats why I use this one which is 10th the size and doesnt do any moralizing for you. thehun.net and everything loads fine, except referrer portals that also also adservers like refer.cc.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

Its not the moralising, its the errors with these kind of files.
I would rather allow everything until it proves to be a problem then filter it specifically.
Its cleaner and more logical for me and more to the point, its less annoying.

Each entry in the list you linked that is marked as "Removed" is a few annoying minutes of head scratching trying to find out if its dead or not.
There have been more removed over the couple of years that hosts file has been building than I have added so I will stick with my current method :)

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

cannot reliably tell whether a server is not responding because of a host hit or a broken server

Sure you can. Very easily. I can think of two ways right off the top of my head:

1) Open the host file. CTRL-F, enter name of server. Is it found? 2) Start -> Run -> cmd -> ping server.com Does it time out, or resolve to 127.0.0.1 (then time out)?

You can get even more creative. Set up a webserver on your browsing machine. Bind it to localhost. Have it serve up only a single, pleasant to look at image. Redirect all your 404's to there. Then when you load a page, if it's been host'd, you'll see your image. If the server is dead, you get the remote 404.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[complete loony]

And if you aren't running a web server, you should get a connection refused right quick too.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I once created a trivial web server that just returned a gif of a single blue pixel to every request. Then I redirected ad servers at that. Of course this was before the really nasty flash ads started. I loved to see that relaxing blue field. Now I use stuff that just rewrites the HTML and removes stuff I don't like.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Hatta]

How do you know the difference between dead because its off the internet or dead because of your host list?

Because it works when I come back later. If there are false positives, they're on sites I don't care about anyway. What kind of sites have you found to be falsely blocked? Do they actually have any useful information? I doubt it.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[Carnildo]

Since it's a private server, the logs get rotated into /dev/null on a daily basis.

no slowdown at all...

[Endymion]

...for me at least. Blocking Google Analytics, Doubleclick, etc, with noscript has made my browsing experience much smoother. Not only is it nice to not have the random pauses while it hits the ad-server, not running the javascript has helped the render time on some pages as well (even if you still run the javascript for the page itself!)

Re:no slowdown at all...

[jgc7]

Which brings up a question... Does automated ad removal create an unauthorized derivative of a copyrighted work? IANAL, but I don't think it is so long as the ads require web requests to other remote documents. If the ads are embedded (like the Google SERPs), then removing the ads probably constitutes copyright infringement.

Re:no slowdown at all...

[ajs318]

No; the derivative work created by removal of advertisements of a web page is specifically authorised by the Law of the Land as Fair Dealing / Fair Use. It would only become potentially-infringing if you shew it to anyone else.

Here Here!

[ilikenwf]

Use FF and AdBlock Plus...

Re:Here Here!

[markov_chain]

Better add Agent Switcher to the list... you'll need it when the web site owners see this discussion ;)

Re:Here Here!

[ilikenwf]

I am a website owner! I know there are better ways than ads to make money...that's what blackhat SEO is for! Ads and affiliate links on sites targeted at MSN users who don't know that they don't own a copy of "my internet" inside of their computer, which they think is only the monitor.

Re:Here Here!

[glop]

Well actually, I was thinking that the Slashdot admins must be interested in what is said here. After all, it's a way to evaluate how people feel about ads, what they do about them and maybe figure out ways to convince most people to just let the ads display when they browse the web.
I have never used ad blockers because I was mostly accessing sites where they are not a pain in the ass.

Recently I have installed Noscript to (hopefully) enjoy safer browsing. A side effect is that I am no longer seeing most ads. Even the least intrusive ones. The Slashdot page I type this on as NO AD at all because of that and I feel slightly guilty about that.

But I really don't like the idea of allow GoogleAnalytics and Doubleclick's Javascript to run on my computer... So I am blocking ads without even trying to...

Re:Here Here!

[BenoitRen]

It's "Hear, Hear", dammit...

Use No-Script

[wal]

No-Script does a great job solving this problem.

How much? nothing... at least for me

[xtracto]

I have not been bothered by ads since I installed AdBlock Plus (in Firefox) or Privoxy (using Opera). In fact it is really interesting (and cumbersome) to see the "real" internet whenever I have to browse the web in a computer that does not have such applications.

Other than that, this is a non story.

Nothing for you to see here, move along

Re:How much? nothing... at least for me

[forgotten_my_nick]

What is even more interesting is that when you block adverts you can see the real page.

For example Fox News website something like 2-3 paragraphs is the story and the rest of the page is basically adverts or links away.

Display the page before the data's all loaded

[mh101]

Yes, I had noticed it recently too, where the page isn't displaying because of waiting for a response from an ad server.

So why don't all web browsers start displaying the data they do have, rather than waiting for the ad server to submit it's data first? If there's a delay in downloading an image on the site or a style sheet it still starts displaying and when the image/stylesheet is downloaded the page is re-rendered to reflect that. So what is it about the page design that forces web browsers to not display anything if the delay is due to an ad server?

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[ZachPruckowski]

Javascript is usually involved. Because Javascript is single-threaded and does in-order execution, if an ad uses Javascript, then waiting on that javascript to finish will hold up the rest of the page.

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[mikkelm]

Opera does it. For reasons unknown, neither Firefox nor IE do it.

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[cerberusss]

Oh, JavaScript is multithreaded alright. I'm currently working for a fortune 500 company and I'm using a technique involving 35 pop-ups where popup 1 is a message-passing hub for all other pop-ups. Together these form the heart of our business of racks and racks full of dual Xeons pumping out ads like there's no tomorrow.

I would make it cross-browser too, if it weren't for F^(&(* AdBlock.

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[dreddnott]

Yup, Opera is truly a glorious browser.

If you go to Preferences, click on Browsing, and click on the Advanced tab, you'll see a combo-box supertitled "Loading" which allows you to set Opera to redraw instantly (as the data comes in), after 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds, or after the whole page is loaded (which is about as stupid of a setting as it gets).

If Opera wasn't around I probably wouldn't use the Internet nearly as much as I do...dial-up sucks enough with it.

It does some other magical things for slow connection users, besides instant back and forward navigation thanks to savvy RAM cache handling, it also doesn't preload elements with the display:none attribute, saving me plenty of time.

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[cibyr]

I don't know if it's what you were getting at, but using javascript "ads" to do distributed computing doesn't actually seem like a terrible idea. As long as it isn't disruptive, I'd actually welcome it as a way of supporting the sites I visit. I really don't want to see distracting ads while I'm reading (or worse, those goddamn video ads that rape my download quota and then start playing in a background tab so I have to flip through all my tabs to find it and mute it), but I wouldn't mind giving up a share of my CPU while I'm visiting your site - just don't bog down my machine or my network connection, and don't let it get in the way of your content.

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[cerberusss]

but I wouldn't mind giving up a share of my CPU while I'm visiting your site

I was joking around a bit but that's actually a pretty good idea. I.e. when visiting a website, some javascript is automatically downloaded which does an hour of distributed computing or something.

There are many downsides, but it could be done.

opposite

[duranaki]

I usually find that the ad's load and then the content comes along. Of course this could be by design and not because the content servers are slower.

Ads Not the Bottleneck

[moore.dustin]

While the site may not fully load (See: Done) the sites contents loading should not dependent on the ad servers. Ad servers, as described in the summary, are not part of the site server, thus making it impossible for it to be the bottleneck of the site. Everything server side will load at its usual rate, and the calls to outside servers will be handled at the usual rate of the other server. One should not have an impact on the other unless something is designed that way, in which case it is the programmers fault more than anyones.

Sure I would rather have the quickest possible times to (Done), but if the only thing holding me up is an ad or Analytics, excuse me for not caring to much.

Re:Ads Not the Bottleneck

[Skye16]

Wrong. Ads *are* the bottle neck, especially on vanilla FF. How? Because these calls, made to google analytics from *my* computer, don't get responses. So the whole browser sits and waits, while I stare at a completely blank screen, watching the little bar at the bottom tell me what it's waiting on and where it's trying to get it from.

So, no. JavaScript enhanced advertisement services -do- slow the page rendering down, sometimes bringing it to a screeching halt. The only option is a: AdBlock + filter for google analytics or b: clicking refresh every 30 seconds or so, waiting for google analytics to come back (or a switch somewhere on my route to come back to life).

Although someone mentioned http pipelining turned on in FF. I just did that right now, hopefully it helps :]

Re:Ads Not the Bottleneck

[moore.dustin]

No sorry, that is not the bottleneck. A site will still render fine if a call to an offsite server is not responding or is slow. The local server does not need that information to load in order to complete its request... it simply makes the request and moves on to the next. The local site generates the element the ad is going to be displayed in, makes the request and continues on. How does it matter to the local server if the offsite call does not respond? Unless something locally is depending on whatever is received from the offsite call, it should not effect the rest of the page loading.

You are either making this up or visiting the worse sites around, both of which do not prove that the ad servers are the problem. If you were looking at a blank page waiting for Analytics, which you aren't, it is webmasters fault. Google code is to be placed at the END of the page... why do you think that is? So everything else can render before Google is called, this not having any effect on the speed the content of your page is loaded, but the overall load(See: Done) may be longer. Second, your computer does not call Google. Analytics, just like any other stat thing, takes your variables, stored in your browser, and sends the info to Google, you do not really send anything, Google collects the info from your browser and sends it. Other stat programs do the same exact thing, except it is server side so the data does not have to be sent offsite.

You have the problem with your computer and your settings if you are really having the problems you describe. I am visit a plethora of sites every single day and never have to do what you are claiming to be doing. you even imply it is a common thing, which makes me even more skeptical.

Re:Ads Not the Bottleneck

[FireFury03]

Ads *are* the bottle neck, especially on vanilla FF. How? Because these calls, made to google analytics from *my* computer, don't get responses.

Minor point, but since when was Google Analytics an advertising service?

Re:Ads Not the Bottleneck

[brunascle]

ad servers do not affect your browser's traffic with the servers, but it does affect the display of the page. you can view source of the HTML and it will all be there, but if there's a script tag pointing to an external source, it wont display anything after the script tag until it downloads the external file.

example (save and open in a .html file):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/asdfsdf"> </script>
Hi, Sir.

of course, this example will only work until that obnoxious site comes back up.

Re:Ads Not the Bottleneck

[Skye16]

I'm sorry, we must be using different definitions of the word bottleneck, then. My definition says something like "anything that causes the task at hand to slow down or halt". You claim it's the webmasters' fault for not having said JS at the bottom of the page. I claim it's the advertising (or other 3rd party service)'s fault for using JavaScript entirely. One is clearly a limited technology in this particular regard, the other is, you know, standard web design practice (ie: all 's go in the tag and whatnot). How dare those crazy webdevelopers not use a hack to fix a broken delivery method! THEY SHOULD NEVER EXPECT THE SERVICE TO WORK THE WAY IT'S ADVERTISED! for shame!)

Re:Ads Not the Bottleneck

[Skye16]

Right you are - in my latest reply to the GGP, I changed it to "advertising services or other 3rd party services". It's more accurate anyway. The problem isn't advertisers using it, necessarily, aside from the fact that they're so prevalent. The problem is that *somebody* is using a method that has some pretty serious limitations.

All the same, I was wrong when I called Google Analytics an advertising service. My bad :]

High-CPU Flash Ads

[Kenshin]

What pisses me off are badly designed Flash ads. They use plenty of CPU power just to animate something completely useless. Last year Dell was running this ad on my local newspaper's site that took 80% of my CPU just to animate FALLING SNOWFLAKES. I complained to the website, and they took it down.

Some Flash ads barely take any CPU at all, and those are honestly fine by me, but some just hog my resources. The problem is that the people who DESIGN these ads typically have cutting-edge machines, so they don't know what it's like to run them on a shitty office machine. So, please, TEST your ads on a shitbox average computer before you force them on us!

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

More annoying are the movie preview ones that you can't stop. I went to a site with a vertical and horizontal flash banner with a loud preview, both for the same film. As they loaded slightly out of time with each other, it was horrible!

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Video ads for a movie aren't so bad compared to having them used for an insurance company.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[sydbarrett74]

I would say that most sites' implementation of Flash is horrendous. Witness a site like Myspace, where if a person has a busy webpage, it's enough to cause my quad-core Mac Pro to seize up and require a restart (both Firefox and Safari put the machine into a state of deadlock). And lest one chalk it down to hardware or OS problems, I know other people with Core2 Duo-based machines (both OSX and Windows) who suffer the same problems. Probably what's happening is that people who have no business developing websites go into Dreamweaver and churn out monstrosities without any concept of what they're actually doing.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[budgenator]

If the developers only test their sites against one browser, IE 7, what do you estimate the odds of them test against slow machines are?

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Nezer]

So, please, TEST your ads on a shitbox average computer before you force them on us!

And, whatever you might think is an average machine, divide it by at least two. Every large corporation I have worked for have been incredibly stingy with the hardware they issue. My last gig at IBM gave me a 7-year old laptop that I had to upgrade with my own RAM and hard disk to make it remotely usable (4 GB hard disk and 128 MB of RAM barly ran when it was new let alone last year). I fought tooth and nail to get that thing upgraded which they finally did the week I gave my notice.

My point is that companies are usually pretty cheap and will try to pawn off the shittiest hardware you can imagine on employees not realizing that the money they think they are saving is lost 10+ times over in lost productivity.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ will solve that problem. It makes sites much more enjoyable and quicker to load.

Definately a must if you use Firefox.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[miskatonic alumnus]

That reminds me of the time I had dialup with my home page set to Yahoo!. They ran this Flash Ad for SBC/Yahoo! high speed internet (with the little rocket ship) that took foreeevvvvveeerrr to download. Guess what? It worked.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[jandrese]

Stop working for such crappy companies then. Mine has a policy where every 18 months they replace your laptop with a brand new one that while not top of the line, is no slouch (usually something like a Dell Latitude D620 I think with the C2D and 2GB of memory).

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[FireFury03]

What pisses me off are badly designed Flash ads.

Flash ads have lots of problems
- They use CPU time that I want to use for something else
- Just leaving a browser open with a flash ad uses more battery power, shortening the battery life of my notebook
- They cause the annoying "this site needs a plugin" bar to appear in FireFox on my 64 bit machines (which don't have Flash installed)
- They use lots of bandwidth
- Often they have sound that automatically starts playing when the site loads
- Often they are designed to be expandable and because FireFox doesn't handle the z-index properly when displaying plugins the space the ad can expand into covers up the page I want to see

I used to be quite selective with what ads I blocked, but these days advertisers that serve up flash ads end up getting their entire domain adblocked.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[psydeshow]

Umm, do you think maybe DELL wanted you to think that your computer was slow _on purpose_?

I find it hard to imagine that the agency that produced your snowflakes ad didn't know exactly what they were doing.

Perhaps that's still the case with online... whenever you see a technical glitch in a TV ad, you can bet that it was actually intended to catch your attention. These folks pay a lot of money to the designers and producers; nothing is left to chance.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[StarfishOne]

I know all too well what you're describing. Quite a bit of relief is found in the following Firefox extension:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

This extension replaces flash movies/objects with a button you can click to view them. You can also whitelist certain websites (e.g. YouTube) to always show the flash movie directly.

I do have to note though that when trying to whitelist a website I am viewing at that very moment, the extension does crash my browser every now and then. It might be something on my machine though! Anyway, with FireFox being able to restore sessions now, I find it a 'must have' extension to block out those CPU-consuming flash movies. I truly hate them

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

I use flashblock with FF. Flash stuff then shows up as an empty box with an F in it which you click to load.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Kenshin]

While I did take that into consideration, and there's a chance it may be true, I only like using that example because I managed to get a major newspaper to remove the ad from their site with a single, acknowledged complaint. (I assume they loaded it up on a worker's computer, saw the issue, and decided it may deter people from visiting.)

But the Dell ad aside, there's plenty of other Flash ads that like to hog my CPU for unoptimized shit like lens flares and confetti.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Vampyre_Dark]

Actually, those shitty ads don't tend to run any smoother on a top of the line box either. I just upgraded from an old 1.1 duron to an ahtlon 64 and they tend to have the same effect. Trying to render a ton of dynamically resized vector snowflakes in software will have that effect.

An easy way to fix this is to right click in the flash object and select low detail, but you can never have that option stick. It's set back to high every time a new flash object loads.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Pope]

I find it hard to imagine that the agency that produced your snowflakes ad didn't know exactly what they were doing.

LOL, you wouldn't beleive the incompetant shit I've seen coming out of my company's agency of record. Some places just have no idea what internet advertising can and cannot do, nor how to use it effectively. They just throw money and shit at the wall to see what sticks.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[g1zmo]

I use Flashblock also, but I've never had problems with crashes like you describe. Flashblock and Adblock Plus are the only two FF extensions I use, and it makes the web so much more pleasant to use. NoScript is pretty great too, but it's just too dang cumbersome for my tastes, what with all of the per-site configuration. Anyways, that's my $.02.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Warbothong]

"took 80% of my CPU just to animate FALLING SNOWFLAKES."

Are you sure you weren't using Gnash? :)

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[CRiMSON]

Yah no shit. My desktop is a Dualcore, 4G, 2x 24" widescreen, and that's standard.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[jasonwea]

Ah yes, bug 345529. If my Firefox instance isn't quite new I get the crash whenever adding an exception. I have also had some randomish crashes as well which have completely disappeared since removing Flashblock.

Luckily for me, removing Flashblock and leaving Adblock Plus doesn't seem to have negatively affecting my browsing experience much at all. EasyList does a great job here at blocking both flash and non-flash adverts.

I'm no longer concerned about not having Flashblock. The only real reason I used it was to stop YouTube videos playing automatically and now I've discovered TubeStop. Any site with flash that annoys me (advert or otherwise, typically unrequested sound) gets their tab closed. Problem solved.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Witness a site like Myspace, where if a person has a busy webpage, it's enough to cause my quad-core Mac Pro to seize up and require a restart (both Firefox and Safari put the machine into a state of deadlock). And lest one chalk it down to hardware or OS problems, I know other people with Core2 Duo-based machines (both OSX and Windows) who suffer the same problems.

I don't know what's wrong with your OS or hardware, but I've been to my share of shitty myspace pages (well, nearly all of them are) but have yet to ever have to reboot my machine (which is a pentium-M underclocked to 600mhz most of the time) for any sort of web page.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[TaoPhoenix]

Oh Gawd, Yes.

Half of the discussion was "fine as it went" when it was talking about customer eyeballs. But I am getting NO benefit from excessive CPU hogging when reading a *text file*!

I have a particular class of older Dell machine at work from the end of the old NetBurst era. Those machines started quiet, but when one of these ads comes on, the fan kicks in and sounds like an aircraft taking off. Then I'd reboot to get the fan to reset to normal.

I vaguely knew of adblock, but I hadn't quiet made the connection between that module and all the times I happened to glance at a page and see it get stuck on an ad server, or that there was anything I could do to keep that fan from kicking in.

Kudos to this article's comments for leading me to the correct web searches to learn about pipelining, wildcard filters to block google analytics, etc.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[TheSoggyCow]

Guilty as Charged... :-P

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably what's happening is that people who have no business developing websites go into Dreamweaver and churn out monstrosities without any concept of what they're actually doing.

Otherwise called commercial web design.

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a huge advertising concern that has a seperate umbrella company for all IT needs of the various agencies that the parent owns (shared services model, it bites). Our IT company has its own portal for our internal BS. The log in screen to the portal is so crap heavy with flash and animation (IE only, btw) that it completely bogs the VNC framebuffer and I can't even log in over a VNC connection.

With more browsing happening on mobile devices, pages like this are sure to see the way of the dodo. Please.

I don't mind flashing ads on a web page...

[GodfatherofSoul]

After all, the publishers probably want some revenue for their work. What I do mind are websites that stop loading when there's a problem retrieving ads.

Re:I don't mind flashing ads on a web page...

[dattaway]

After all, the publishers probably want some revenue for their work. What I do mind are websites that stop loading when there's a problem retrieving ads.

I remember an internet before AOL and things were community driven. People published for the common good and there was no shortage of information. After AOL opened the floodgates of its business model, it took a crock of a Lawyer (C&S) to teach us what spam was about. If forced advertisements weren't enough, we now have lawmakers trying to apply their business models to what should be a simple network. What have we really gained?

Re:I don't mind flashing ads on a web page...

[benwaggoner]

Many orders of magnitude more content?

I imagine many of the sites that existed in your golden age are still up, and are still ad free. If that was enough, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Agreed

[garett_spencley]

I run a few web sites and on some I have a geo-IP targeted ad that loads in an iframe. This particular ad is often a bottleneck so I wanted to solve it. My first idea was to run a wget on the server and cache the output to the hard disk so I can load the ad from the server instead of a 3rd party. This would also require one less DNS look-up.

Then I realized that it would completely fail because the ad is geo-IP. So the cache will always display the location of my server, and not the user.

The obvious solution is for ad companies to offer scripts to their affiliates that could be run on the servers hosting the sites. Of course that opens up new problems, like security issues. But if the code were open we could spot such issues.

In fact, that seems to me like such a simple and obvious solution. The only reason that ad companies don't do that (that I can think of) is that they want to appeal to people running on free hosts where they can't run server-side scripts. But there's no reason not to offer both IMO. I also thought that they wanted to keep things as absolutely simple as possible, and there's nothing simpler than saying "just copy/paste this into your html document". But any web master who rents hosting (shared or dedicated) knows how to upload a php script.

Re:Agreed

[xaxa]

I put some ads on my website using bucks4banners.net. They gave me four or five lines of PHP code (other languages were available). The PHP passes the requesting IP to the ad server (presumably for geo-location) and in return gets a block of HTML.

For people who couldn't run PHP, plain HTML was available, but they said you'd have to update it every couple of months.

Re:Agreed

[db32]

The fact is it is not a problem for the ad company. Why would they hire developers and support staff to handle an additional layer of complexity that would provide no significant increase in income. And like you said now there would be security issues on top of it. It would be a horrible business decision

That said, trust me when I say "any web master who ... knows how to upload a php script" is completely, utterly, and totally false. Back in my freelance days I can't even begin to tell you how many people got various levels of hosting without so much as a clue as to how a web page works. Feel free to try and explain what the scripts are, what ASP and PHP and whatnot are to someone who doesn't know what HTML is. They just fire up front page and drag pretty pictures and type on the screen and hit publish.

Re:Agreed

[garett_spencley]

The PHP passes the requesting IP to the ad server (presumably for geo-location) and in return gets a block of HTML.

But that's no better than loading the script on their domain in an iframe. The only advantage I can think of is that the user's web browser doesn't have to resolve their server's domain. But if their server is down, or loading slow, your page is going to be slow. In fact, this could be worse than an iframe because at least with an iframe the rest of your page will load and only the iframe will hang. In the case of copying some PHP that calls up their server your whole page will hang at that spot. So unless it's at the very bottom of your page then you're screwed if their server goes down.

What a geo-ip ad company would need to do is give you an ip-to-country database to host on your server and a small script that resolves the geo-ip stuff on your machine. That way the only bottleneck is your server itself. If their ad servers go down or load slowly your site doesn't suffer.

Re:Agreed

[Xtravar]

So what happens when you (forgive the pseudo PHP code):

foreach(ip in every_ip_in_existence)
{
  $html = get_ad(ip);
// do nothing here
}

In other words, the more code the ad companies give you, the more you can game them... they'd need a way of safeguarding against those types of things. Not saying it's not possible, but significantly harder to run a large-scale ad operation like Doubleclick/Google.

Re:Agreed

[xaxa]

Yes, I agree! In true /. style I didn't really read the parent. I mentioned it as an example of a company that did give a PHP script, it wouldn't be that big a step to add the geo-ip bit. I suspect they want more control than that though.

Server-to-server might be a faster pipe, which could help, there's one less HTTP connection to be made too. It hadn't occurred to me what would happen if their site went down, I think I'll move the ads to the bottom now and flush() my content before fetching them.

Re:Agreed

[xaxa]

I'm too honest to have thought of that.

Maybe if they say they'll stop paying me ;-)

Re:Agreed

[LWATCDR]

"They just fire up front page and drag pretty pictures and type on the screen and hit publish." Naw they just use Word and save as HTML.... Shudder.....

Re:Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

But any web master who rents hosting (shared or dedicated) knows how to upload a php script. NOT! I own shared hosting. Most my clients couldn't upload a php script if it bit them in the butt. I prefer that way... less risk to the server. :) I'm not really a coward, I just cant remember my login, it's at home and I'm not.

HOSTS File?

[ubernode]

Me likey ABP but one can achieve the same effect via the HOSTS file:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

I noticed a major improvement in site load times upon using the MVPS file.

Cheers.

Re:HOSTS File?

[Computershack]

I prefer the HOSTS method as well. Doesn't matter what browser you use and it also gets rid of some of the ads in messenger programs as well.

It's amazing how much difference it makes.

Re:HOSTS File?

[Lawrence_Bird]

yes.. and leaves your browsers with lots of annoying messages
about ads not loading.  How to avoid those?

javascript DEFER

[Anonymous Coward]

DEFER is your friend. The scripts won't load until after the page loads.

Re:javascript DEFER

[multipartmixed]

DEFER is not supported by Firefox. Nor Safari, for that matter.

Re:javascript DEFER

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has supported DEFER since v1.5.

Most of them only slow me down once

[ShaunC]

Or as few times as it takes me to notice them. Anytime a new ad server is hanging me up, it winds up in my local named.conf. I've found that running an instance of named is a very efficient method of blackholing ad servers. It's also less hassle than trying to keep up with a hosts file or browser plugins on multiple machines. Plus, instead of playing whack-a-mole with the continuing onslaught of new subdomains (2o7.net is bad about this), you can just "disappear" an entire domain forever.

Google Analytics/Urchin has earned a spot in my dead zone file - for that damned .js they so love to serve up - along with countless others. And yes, it speeds browsing up to have that junk not load.

Re:Most of them only slow me down once

[budgenator]

I just installed the Google Load Time Analyzer from mozilla addons and now www.google-analytics.com just flies go figure. Try it and see if your mileage varies, it's like they know your watching or something!

Adblock!

[igotmybfg]

like it, love it, live it

As the first post said.. use firefox :D

[Fallen Kell]

Block the ads and no more slowness.

Re:As the first post said.. use firefox :D

[BenoitRen]

SeaMonkey and K-Meleon can also use Adblock Plus, you know.

Re:As the first post said.. use firefox :D

[jZnat]

And Flock. Konqueror has built-in Adblock as well.

Why no studies will be done.

[gru3hunt3r]

Nobody cares. (at least nobody that matters cares)

The fact of the matter is that the website operators who buys these products is technically illiterate, and their eyes glaze over when you talk about things like latency.

They don't realize that every piece of external javascript you reference slows down the site, and also decreases the availability (webpages that reference external scripts won't load if the script can't be loaded) -- and also introduce potential security xss holes if the remote site is compromised.

I spend my days in futility trying to explain this to business owners.
They don't care.

But I love the idea of writing a firefox plug-in that specifically blocks most analytics sites javascript from loading.. that's a darn spiffy idea.

Define Irony

[andrewtheadminguy]

I just find it wildly hilarious that this story immediately followed the story about blocking Firefox users because of the ABP plugin.

Technological Darwinism

[Gothmolly]

I use Firefox, Adblock and Flashblock. The Intarweb isn't slow for me, or probably 1/2 the users on here. When it slows enough for Joe Mouthbreather on his Walmart $299 PC, people might start to care/redesign/etc. It's a self-correcting problem.

How to fix - browsing habits

[ZachPruckowski]

I know this problem exists, but through my browsing habits, I've found a work-around. What I do is open up three or four sites in tabs, and then open more in the background while I'm reading those. Because I spend upwards of a minute reading the first site, the others have loaded in the background before I finish reading the second or third page. So even if one or two pages have a long-load time, I barely notice.

Alternatively, use AdBlock.

they dont bother me at all

[Anonymous Admin]

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

127.0.0.2 analytics.google.com

Re:they dont bother me at all

[Anonymous Coward]

so is that like, localhosts neighbor? maybe we should just call .1 localerhost, and all the rest localishhost

Re:they dont bother me at all

[Shabbs]

Why stop there. Block 'em all!

http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/

They don't even get a chance.

Re:they dont bother me at all

[Anonymous Admin]

127.0.0.1 is a local loop back address.
127.0.0.2 is a non existent address on the same subnet.
it times out even faster than 127.0.0.1

oh, and that is not the only spy site/crap monger i have assigned to that address. I have over 1000 entries all assigned to that address.

Re:they dont bother me at all

[prockcore]

127.0.0.2 is a non existent address on the same subnet.

Wrong. 127.x.x.x is all loopback. 127.41.2.67 is the exact same as 127.0.0.1

$ ping 127.41.2.67
64 bytes from 127.41.2.67: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.032 ms

Site Caches

[jessecurry]

Maybe creating an ad model that locally caches the heavy part of an ad would be a good thing, ads could be updated with pushes or according to some schedule, but the main part of the add content could be served from whatever site is showing the ad.
In practice I don't really see slow ads as being a problem though.

Primary reason to block ads.

[BMonger]

This is the main reason I block ads. Not because the graphics annoy me. Just because I hate waiting for the 8 ads on the page to load even though the main content has been served. I figure by blocking the ads I am doing a service to the ad company by reducing their bandwidth costs so they can be better utilized for people that enjoy clicking on ads.

Maybe if we all turned our ad blockers off for a day we could crash the ad servers due to the new high load? :)

Re:Primary reason to block ads.

[Axion22]

Same here. Although I let NoScript handle most of the ad blocking. I do allow google-analytics, tho. What can I say? I'm ingrained to the Goog.

Re:Primary reason to block ads.

[Lookin4Trouble]

Maybe if we all turned our add blockers off for a day we could crash the ad servers due to the new high load? :)

Alternatively, why don't we re-set-up those oldstyle sites that when you open the page, immediately begins !REFRESH of every available graphic served out by xrandom(ad)server.

I'll have to search for the story, but I believe someone set one up for a crooked camera company last year, and brought them to their knees under a $X0,000 bandwidth bill

Let the slashdotting begin

what ads?

[ianare]

What ads are you guys talking about, I see barely any at all. *turns off ad block plus, refreshes* Holy crap! How do you even go online like this? You might as well just watch TV.

Re:what ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this is moderated as funny, it is quite a shock to the system when you use another machine without ad-block and the like. All those animated shitty gifs, and crapromedia stuff going on all over the screen!

Re:what ads?

[tachyonflow]

Ha! This is funny *and* insightful. A co-worker and I are frequently researching web sites, checking out the potential competition to our business ideas, and such. More often than not, I look at a web site and say, "I totally don't understand their business model. How can they fund this sort of a web site without any ads at all? Oh... wait..." Many times it's: "XYZ web site has ads now, you say? No way! When did they start putting ads up?" Heh...

Re:what ads?

[tuxedobob]

I'm at the point where I just don't see images on a page. I don't block them, or use any add-on software. I just don't look at them. When I'm going to a web site, I'm looking for text, and the text is all I look at.

As soon as there's an ad that covers the text I want to look at, just close the window. I don't care who gets paid, but no one's getting any of my money, and the web site obviously wasn't that important if it was trying to cover up the content.

I've never used Adblock.

[Ant P.]

On the other hand I do use noscript. That way the sites that go out of their way to bombard me with obnoxious animated (or even worse: audio) flash ads never get any of my screen space, whereas the ones with a bit more respect for the user still show up.

sloooooow

[Anonymous Coward]

day news
By the way:
Blocking Ad's reduces bandwidth use at a company on a very large scale.

Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse.

[Futurepower(R)]

The people who make ads are a self-destructive bunch. Numerous times I've waited for a Slashdot page to load while some ad server took its time. Abusing me with abusive, dishonest ads wasn't enough, they wanted to abuse me by wasting my time, too. Mentioning the problem to Slashdot editors brought only temporary fixes, or no change.

So now I don't see the ads at all, thanks to Firefox's AdBlock Plus and NoScript add-ons. (I recommend NoScript only for people who don't mind fiddling with permissions for each new web site.)

I guess abusers aren't satisfied with only one kind of abuse. I can dimly remember some of the Slashdot ads. When they weren't misleading, they were generally stupidly written. People with no technical knowledge shouldn't work for technical companies.

They Also Slow the Overall Computer

[CyberLife]

I have problems with certain ads containing content that is so processing intensive it kills my computer's overall performance. I run a dual-headed configuration, and I tend to keep a browser running on my secondary screen for reference while playing WoW. Most of the time this isn't a problem, but certain ads on Wowhead cause a very significant drop in frame-rate. I know its the ads because if I refresh the page (same content, different ads) the situation goes away. If I keep refreshing until I get the offending ads back, my performance again falls through the floor.

Re:They Also Slow the Overall Computer

[Anonymous Coward]

The ads on Thottbot sometimes do that too. I hate when that happens.

Progressive loading

[WPIDalamar]

Making sure your page renders well while it loads can help solve this type of issue.

Putting scripts at the bottom of the page, explictly specifying image heights/widths, and having a single stylesheet at the top of a page can all help.

Re:Progressive loading

[SpankTheUser]

I work for a Very Large Online Publisher, and yeah, this is pretty much the key. There are few reasons for an ad or traffic counter to slow a properly designed page. In fact, displaying pages that render regardless of ads can turn out to be mission critical. A year ago, a story on one of our sites got Drudged, Slashdotted, Boing-Boinged, Dugg, etc. all at once. This is not totally unusual for us, and should not have been a problem for us to handle. However, the servers really started to slow down, and while the sites never went down completely, surfing our content got pretty painful. Culprit turned out to be an interesting interaction between users, ad servers, and our site. We had a slow loading ad that was appearing on most of our page. Because the HTML wasn't well designed, the page content wouldn't load until the ad appeared. Users presumably have figured this out, and would click re-load on their browser over and over again until the ad server finally responded to one of their requests. Result: actual number of requests to our servers grew by an order of magnitude over what we'd normally expect for a given number of actual users. We wrote up a presentation entitled "Slow ads + bad HTML = Company Left $XXX,XXX On the Table" and got the funding to re-code all our templates.

Re:Progressive loading

[gstoddart]

Making sure your page renders well while it loads can help solve this type of issue.

Putting scripts at the bottom of the page, explictly specifying image heights/widths, and having a single stylesheet at the top of a page can all help.

What you say is true.

But, it naively confuses "best practices" for web development with what ad companies are doing. They have no interest in your load speed, or playing nice. They want to make sure you see their ad so they can charge someone else for that fact, your load speed is irrelevant.

The people selling you stuff have their own definition of "best practices", and they have nothing to do with what makes you happy -- you're just an ad impression to them.

Cheers

ComicGenesis experencing ad-related slowdowns

[strredwolf]

I can say (being one of the admins behind CG), Comic Genesis is getting slowed down by ad service providers. While part of it is our end (how we serve the ads is a bit of a hack job), and we now wrap them in iframes just to get some speed back, they're still slowing things down.

And to those above: Firefox with Adblock plus does NOTHING because it has to load in some Javascript first to determine which ad provider to load in, and even then some ad providers chain to another one. Adblock has to wait until an image or flash is loaded up before it can hide it!

So yes, depending on the entire interaction and construction sites can be slowed down by ads.

Re:ComicGenesis experencing ad-related slowdowns

[Anonymous Coward]

That is false. Adblock Plus blocks requests to urls based on strings or regular expressions. It does not load Javascripts in order to figure out what to block nor does it load an image first in order to block it. Often, blocking the scripts prevents Flash objects, image banners, and iframes from being loaded.

Re:ComicGenesis experencing ad-related slowdowns

[Jaxoreth]

Firefox with Adblock plus does NOTHING because it has to load in some Javascript first

That's where NoScript comes in. AdBlock and NoScript are the two reasons I can't go back to Safari or Camino, even though they're better Mac apps overall.

Re:Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse

[Elwood P Dowd]

Either I'm crazy, or something about noscript is very slow. Not as slow as loading all the ads, but it seems to do blocking work every time I go to a new site. Kinda irritating.

Ads? or Webmasters?

[Evets]

The big problem is that most webmasters design their sites in such a way that they are dependent on a third party product being available prior to their pages being rendered.

Google isn't always up. Plenty of times, I see issues because my comcast connection can't see the google servers even though everyone else can get to them just fine.

It's entirely feasible to write your page in such a way that it can display data before any other files are loaded. Serve up ads in an iframe, include tracking images in an iframe or as the last element of a page, etc.

But ads aren't the only thing causing page load problems. Third party widgets, crazy fat CSS and JS files, and pages with way too many images are still a problem.

That is the reason I use a filter

[SmallFurryCreature]

Back in ages long gone, when firefox did not exist you had (still have perhaps) a company called doubleclick whose adservers would sometimes choke freezing the loading of the rest of the page. Why and how this happens? Do I look like someone who gives a shit?

I wanted it gone, and finally I bit the bullet and read up on squid and available plugins and setup my linux router to just filter all http traffic. Haven't looked back since.

Browsing without a blocker is like... well it just sucks. At times I am offcourse forced to browse the web without such blocking software and my god, the internet has become as bad as tv. Do they really think that if you saturate people with advertising to the point the original content becomes unusable people are really going to be more inclined to buy?

Apparently so. However not to me. This story offcourse neatly links to the story below about a site block firefox because of adblocker.

Well, who gives a shit. You went to far, now you gotta pay the price. If you don't get revenue from me, blame doubleclick and all those others who just pushed me over the edge.

At the moment I recommend bfilter to people who are fed up as well, it is browser neutral, works out of the box and does a lot more then just ad-blocking. Granted some flash bits require you to click them before they actually load but that is okay, because 99% of flash stuff I don't want to load.

So yes, ad-servers are slowing the net, by adding stuff to webpages I do not want. Can this be solved? It has been solved, not to the liking of those who depend on those ads being seen, but hey, fuck them. Do they care when I have to reload a page over and over again because some server borked?

Re:That is the reason I use a filter

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they really think that if you saturate people with advertising to the point the original content becomes unusable people are really going to be more inclined to buy?

Since I block so many ads using a variety of methods, how am I supposed to know which products to avoid?

How do I let a company know that their ads are annoying to me and that I do not plan on buying anything from them, if I do not know who is buying ads? Is this a catch-22? I don't want to see ads. I don't want to purchase the stuff in the ads. I don't see the ads for a product so I buy it. How do I know if the product I just bought was the object of a great number of ads on the internet? So my purchase looks like it was influenced by the ad.

Re:That is the reason I use a filter

[TaoPhoenix]

No one says you have to boycott products.

I at least just dislike the ad aggression. If the product itself is worthwhile enough that it sells itself off a shelf, then it's fine by me.

Slow Ad Servers

[krskrs]

I'm one of the few NY Times users who actually paid for extended access, yet on every every visit, the first story I click on (paid or not) stalls on the ad server. After 15 seconds or so, I close the tab and click on the link again, which immediately appears, presumably because the "viewed-ad" cookie is set.

SPLTH#%@T to them.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[blueturffan]

I took one look at your website and immediately clicked away. No offense intended, but it didn't look like a site I would trust downloading anything from.

Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[schwit1]

My internet connection ain't free. If the ad folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege.

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[dballanc]

"My internet connection ain't free. If the folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege."

It's funny that both the user and the website owner share the same argument. As usual in life, it's the few who make it rough for the many. Most people don't mind reasonable ads, and they don't mind contributing financially to a site they enjoy. Unfortunately all it takes is a few greedy jackass types taking the ads to extremes and ruin the concept entirely.

It's too bad there isn't a advertising standard that sites can be certified with and filters can be aware of. An ad whitelisting service, that legitimate companies would value as much as a BBB or google page ranking.

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[Anonymous Coward]

you've got metered bandwidth? seriously?

Where and how, outside of wireless, is this available?

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[Anonymous Coward]

If the ad folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege.

How about they give you free content instead of paying in cash?

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[munrom]

Welcome to Australia, I've got 42GB cap and that's one of the larger ones

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[opkool]

And what about the time wasted waiting for the flipping page to load?

My free time is scarce, and I don't want to waste it waiting for a flipping flash commercial, loaded through crappy scripting, that takes 99% of my CPU.

I pay extra for a DVR, so I can view shows skipping ads.

I say down with advertisement.

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[Wil]

If the ad folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege.

How about they give you free content instead of paying in cash?

They give out loads of free content in the form of small, inspirational pictures (slowly... wait for it...) now appearing at a website near you.

I....

[Billosaur]

haven't... noticed.... slowdown.... personally.....

How about just fewer ads?

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

In my opinion we need a better model for serving ads -- or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth.

I know that this doesn't speak specifically to the rest of your question, but IMHO, we need a better model than having ads. Just because we can have 'em doesn't mean we should all the time. It seems to me that the click-throughs, browser-tracking, etc., benefit the ad companies themselves far more than the individual content providers.

I realize I'm tilting at windmills here, but the current web ad-model has even city and local community web pages (like libraries) littering their pages with 'ads' for other parts of the same site, etc. It is really quite annoying.

/...and stay off my lawn!

Re:How about just fewer ads?

[rhizome]

Welcome to 10 years ago.

A better model?

[nurb432]

A better model for serving ads? My foot. How about stopping the ads in the first place? Problem solved.

Adblock + Pipeline simultaneously?

[Kadin2048]

Can you use HTTP pipelining and Adblock? It doesn't seem like there's any reason why the two would be incompatible. Or is that not what you were implying?

After all, it's your computer that sends out the requests for the ads, and it can only do that once it receives the actual page ... so it seems like there's no reason why you can't install an ad-block and just prevent the requests for the ads entirely, but allow all the requests for the other page elements to be pipelined. Right?

Re:Adblock + Pipeline simultaneously?

[totally bogus dude]

Yep, absolutely correct. There's no mechanism within HTTP for a server to send you content you didn't explicitly request. Which is both a good and a bad thing, I suppose. (But mostly good.)

adshow extension

[jmyers]

How about a Firefox "adshow" extension that pops up every add in a separate window so they can all download at their own speed. Thats a lot better than been a crook and stealing content like adblock users.

but from a business perspective...

[Socguy]

I'm sure it would be, but that would defeat the purpose of about 90% of todays web, which seems to be about using whatever lame content they can dream up to get you to see the adds, or better yet, click on those adds. It goes without saying that if the adds load first you have nothing better to do than look at them.

ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

it is good when people are used to using free services from countless sites on the web, content on the web sites being free (as opposed to purchasing them or subscribing to them like in the printed press case), but when it comes to waiting for a few seconds more for an ad, they do not hesitate from blocking the entire mechanism that made the internet what it is today - ads.

please do so, morons. also preach others to do that too - so that majority of users can start doing the same.

so that way websites will be forced to go on pay to see/subscription models. what a fantastic way to go. from open, free internet to newspaper stand format.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[tomstdenis]

Well in all fairness, most websites couldn't afford to run based solely on ads anyways. So that's hardly a big deal. If they're really worth it, they should be pay/subscribe to start with. Otherwise, it's "yet another run of the mill website" and is a waste anyways.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like someone is angry that they spent the morning sucking advertiser cock.

I'd recommend stopping the cock suck-age, but you do seem to love it.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[Shados]

Personally what irks me with popup blockers and such, is that web sites owners will always find a way... So it is a bit like all these articles we keep seeing, about how not to use antibiotics and such unless we really need to, with the fear of creating "super bacterias" and whatsnot. Same deal: since ad blockers became mainstream, web sites became increasingly annoying about ads. Blocking popups and host files can only go so far, and eventually you have to keep up with the "improvements" in ads delivery...

I don't mind simple banners and stuff. If only it had stayed that way.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[White Flame]

so that way websites will be forced to go on pay to see/subscription models. what a fantastic way to go. from open, free internet to newspaper stand format.

"open, free internet" is what we had before the ads, tracking mechanisms, malicious exploits coming through said ads, and other privacy invasions existed.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]
when it comes to waiting for a few seconds more for an ad, they do not hesitate from blocking the entire mechanism that made the internet what it is today - ads.
[/quote]

If such an ad was just a text ad or a static/non-animated banner ad, then that would a valid point that it is not a good idea to block the ads.

But users are wise to block the entire mechanism that has made the internet what it is today: slow-loading/stalling pages serving obnoxious Flash-based ads (some even with sound effects), jerky/annoying animations even in banner ads, and of course, the pop-up and the pop-under ads. Once the ad is served, the user has no further obligation to interact with the ad. Also, even the text ads with scripts running in the background tracking how long a page is viewed and so on--no, just serve the text ad without the scripts. Any processing related to ad-tracking should be done at the server level and no additional processing should be done on the client machine.

The internet does *not* have to be TV--it's okay to have static text and graphics as content.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[Chandon Seldon]

This is very simple: Just because a business model happens to work today does not mean that anyone is entitled to eternal profits from that business model. As long as ad revenues continue to work, sites will continue to fund themselves that way. If ads get too annoying and everyone blocks them then website owners will have to find other revenue sources. Sorry. That's a market economy for you.

But even the advertising companies aren't legitimately worried about that. Instead, the most profitable such company has simply made their ads less intrusive. I run adblock plus, and - guess what... the text ads on google.com aren't blocked because even the adblock guys aren't bothered by them.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[SharpFang]

When it comes to waiting a few secs, okay. I installed adblock, because fucking Slashdot would take up to a MINUTE for the front page to load (with ads blocked, below 3s).
It isn't merely an inconvenience. It's a full-blown showstopper error.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

that "open, free" internet was just a bunch of sites that were created out of curiosity and created in mostly academic institution infrastructures. without ads internet wouldnt be the trans-national concept it is today.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[smellotron]

that "open, free" internet was just a bunch of sites that were created out of curiosity and created in mostly academic institution infrastructures. without ads internet wouldnt be the trans-national concept it is today.

Yeah, because without ads, sites like Amazon.com wouldn't make a bajillion dollars selling things online in a trans-national market. It's ad revenue alone that keeps them alive. Yup.

You know what? Sites like The Krib are a relic nowadays... that's the sort of content that most of the interesting parts of the WWW used to contain. I was happy with it back then! "Shoot the monkey" advertisements and selfishly duplicated content (uhh... wikipedia text showing up on hundreds of different ad-laden sites?) don't add any value.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

Yeah, because without ads, sites like Amazon.com wouldn't make a bajillion dollars selling things online in a trans-national market. It's ad revenue alone that keeps them alive. Yup.

how many amazons are there ? how many googles ? how many yahoo ?

these kind of sites, which have a whopping reach are an almost nonexistent percentage compared to the privately run one-ten person websites that are dotting the net. recently there was a research noting that majority of the net's content were coming from this sites, from cooking recipes to game hints. what these sites funding themselves with are meager advertising revenues - because as per the unofficial "1 per 1000" rule, roughly 1 visitor would be buying anything from a site out of 1000, and such kind of turnover never is enough to fund a small site. even google, yahoo like giants can get into trouble due to non-ads, or need to turn themselves to some other kind of amazons in this setup. this is bad.

You know what? Sites like The Krib are a relic nowadays... that's the sort of content that most of the interesting parts of the WWW used to contain. I was happy with it back then! "Shoot the monkey" advertisements and selfishly duplicated content (uhh... wikipedia text showing up on hundreds of different ad-laden sites?) don't add any value.

refer to what i said above. the link in my signature is a small business, yet it hosts more than 200 clients' 250 or so sites, and majority of them like the site you described - there are sites with varied contents ranging from "mining basics" guides to personal arts feats, all of them constructed by ordinary people with shallow pockets. just that you cant find such sites through google or any other major engine does not mean that they dont exist. they do exist, and they are the majority on the net, and this "ad blocking" smartiness can be the biggest setback to these sites, and in the end internet.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[White Flame]

that "open, free" internet was just a bunch of sites that were created out of curiosity and created in mostly academic institution infrastructures.without ads internet wouldnt be the trans-national concept it is today.

Yes, "just a bunch of sites" etc is exactly what open and free means. And it was just as trans-national then as it is now. I was interacting and developing with people all over the world back then, whereas today a lot of the 'majority' focus seems to be USA-centric online, so I have no idea what you are implying there. Exactly how long have you been on the internet? It doesn't sound like very long.

Once things get monetized, lockdowns and invasive tracking become imminent, and the freedoms and openness to new concepts and ways of doing things are squelched because it rocks the status quo of shakily established business models (which on the net go obsolete VERY fast anyway) that are trying to make money off of people's free time and voluntary efforts by inserting themselves into the common ways of doing things (which also go obsolete VERY fast on the net). People will always take the path of least resistance, and being an average Joe exploring and contributing to the net means they will continually avoid the funneling and control aspects of internet profit mongering.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

Yes, "just a bunch of sites" etc is exactly what open and free means. And it was just as trans-national then as it is now. I was interacting and developing with people all over the world back then, whereas today a lot of the 'majority' focus seems to be USA-centric online, so I have no idea what you are implying there. Exactly how long have you been on the internet? It doesn't sound like very long.

this is elitism. you are talking about and gratifying an era that internet was limited to a bunch of sites, was serving a very small minority, and that mostly academicians. plain old elitism.

if you dig, you can find bazillions of the site types you want. you should ask yourself maybe you have gone rather lazy, with all search engine/directories around like google and such, and is not seeking for anything that you dont find on the 2nd page of google anymore ? how did you learn of the sites back then ? there were times sites were coming up with ips, there was no domain name around. yet people were finding sites by word of mouth. word of mouth is still here, and still as slow as it was back then - if you are finding kind of sites you like by word of mouth with the same speed, and i dont see any reason you cant, you dont need to even vie for old times. because nothing is changed - still there are a bunch of sites of the kind you speak of on university/institiution networks, and there are on private domains even, not only uni/inst. networks - finding them is as fast as it was back then, so whats the trouble ?

Once things get monetized, lockdowns and invasive tracking become imminent, and the freedoms and openness to new concepts and ways of doing things are squelched because it rocks the status quo of shakily established business models (which on the net go obsolete VERY fast anyway) that are trying to make money off of people's free time and voluntary efforts by inserting themselves into the common ways of doing things (which also go obsolete VERY fast on the net). People will always take the path of least resistance, and being an average Joe exploring and contributing to the net means they will continually avoid the funneling and control aspects of internet profit mongering.

what you said above is not valid for site discussion. and in regard to internet, to fight back option is always there, and there are many fighting back and winning. open source is an example, wiki is another example, bloggers with their $50-60 budget-hosting sites reaching out to 900 000 unique people a month are another example. everything comes with a price. the thing is to buy the right thing for the right price.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[White Flame]

this is elitism. you are talking about and gratifying an era that internet was limited to a bunch of sites, was serving a very small minority, and that mostly academicians. plain old elitism. [stuff about websearching and word of mouth]

The web is still limited to just a bunch of sites, that's pretty much what it is by definition. Obviously, the internet is far more than that, and always was; I presume you were just using 'web' and 'internet' interchangeably as is common.

As far as searching goes, there were automated search engines long before Google, there were manual web directories, there were discussion boards with links all over the place... the same way we have now. As far as word of mouth goes, it is FAST on the internet. Something strikes a chord and it is in email folders and forums all over the world nearly instantly... just like it was 40 years ago. It is true that there is far more social and other non-scientific/governmental/academic content online now than then, but the content isn't the point; the point is people avoiding the invasiveness that now pervades the internet with the unwanted abundance of tracking and advertising. Besides, there was tons of just-for-fun stuff online then, people's own opinionated pages, online games, social areas, etc, dating well back to the 70s and even 60s.

The internet contains exactly the same stuff now as it did then, just on a different scale and with the addition of the petty profiteering of every little chump with a webpage. And name services (yes, DNS is a relatively new one) are as old as the internet, so I don't know what that was supposed to imply.

what you said above is not valid for site discussion. and in regard to internet, to fight back option is always there, and there are many fighting back and winning. open source is an example, wiki is another example, bloggers with their $50-60 budget-hosting sites reaching out to 900 000 unique people a month are another example. everything comes with a price. the thing is to buy the right thing for the right price.

All of the examples are equal; any perceived difference is spin from marketers rationalizing their 'right' to know who is doing what online, and from advertisers trying to justify their own unsustainable business models. People pay for hosting so that the world can see their content, whether it be their own writing, software, or new alien cult. It's a relatively new and completely unsustainable concept that people should somehow magically get paid just for putting stuff online. The only thing that will change the current monetary burden of hosting is pervasive peer-to-peer 'hosting' where no single point of bandwidth concentration needs to be paid for; everyone would just maintain their own link and forward what interests them.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

As far as searching goes, there were automated search engines long before Google, there were manual web directories, there were discussion boards with links all over the place... the same way we have now. As far as word of mouth goes, it is FAST on the internet. Something strikes a chord and it is in email folders and forums all over the world nearly instantly... just like it was 40 years ago. It is true that there is far more social and other non-scientific/governmental/academic content online now than then, but the content isn't the point; the point is people avoiding the invasiveness that now pervades the internet with the unwanted abundance of tracking and advertising. Besides, there was tons of just-for-fun stuff online then, people's own opinionated pages, online games, social areas, etc, dating well back to the 70s and even 60s.

first you spoke as if your main concern was the quality, then you moved into privacy.

15-20 years ago, web/internet/anything i.t. being just a curiosity among technological institution/university people and therefore there being no risks of privacy violation, or invasive facets of it also means that it was pretty useless, being just a toy amongst a very limited portion of populace.

for things to revolutionize the world, widespread usage is necessary. this is what we got in the last 15 years. and you yourself saying that there are still strong word of mouth practices around the net, content sites, good sites, so there shouldnt be any problem.

It's a relatively new and completely unsustainable concept that people should somehow magically get paid just for putting stuff online. The only thing that will change the current monetary burden of hosting is pervasive peer-to-peer 'hosting' where no single point of bandwidth concentration needs to be paid for; everyone would just maintain their own link and forward what interests them.

information is NOT free. you apparently missed that point - maybe due to the very successful model that you disdain - sponsorship through advertising -, you, like many people just got accustomed to things being 'free' on the net. it is not as such. even in the days where sites were popping up in university infrastructures nothing was free - the people there were already being paid for their presence there, by govt (scholarships) or their parents if students, and by the university if they were academicians. so they were taking those paid time off and putting and maintaining stuff on the web. just the infrastructure seemed 'free', because it was not directly paid.

and afterwards with the boom of the advertising business model on the net, and the expansion of the net, apparently people got too accustomed to things being free on the net to the extent that it has become the accepted 'norm'. and they now started to see advertisements as 'annoyance' and 'invasion'.

well. nothing comes for free in life. trigger happy darwinian approaches like "unsuccessful business models should be let die" (even though there is no proof of being unsuccessful - you people here arguing that you have a right to block ads, even though they are the factor that by which the content is paid for) just makes what one cherishes and cares for to go away along with the 'unsuccessful business model' sometimes. this is one of those incidents - actually the issue is very simple here - people want to get stuff, but do not want to pay. in this case the stuff is content/information, and payment is enduring advertisements. hence the selfishness.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[White Flame]

I never had any complaint about the internet's quality of content. You claim that the internet of 20 years ago was a 'toy', yet I was showing that it had the same content and services as nowadays, complete with profitable international businesses and trade, free and for-pay fun stuff and socializing services, etc. This shows that the added advertising and money grubbing of today is not critical in any way to the internet's health. The addition of such people like you relying on this added garbage did not make it magically attain some different 'non-toy' status; the online content and services (both commercial and personal/social/academic) were already there, and are still progressing and developing regardless.

I never said that the internet should be cost-free. It is you who whine about internet hosting not being free, and want free money in return. People who host stuff are generally stuck with the cost, or endure the terms of service to piggyback on other people who already pay for hosting. If you can't afford to host your own content, or don't want to endure others' terms, or can't get customers or investors to pay for it, then too bad... you can't afford to do that online. You have no right to expect to be paid for simply having content online for free.

You do have the right to pursue profitable business models online, as many online providers of products and services have. But as soon as these models start trying to tell people that they can obtain content only with strings attached, implement covert tracking systems with potential back doors, and other such things that many like myself find offensive, then we will not endure your encumbrances and you will lose revenue. Sucks to be you.

This is exactly like a spider setting up a web hoping to catch flies, and the flies are getting what they want and aren't sticking. That's the spider's problem, not the flies'.

There is an old saying in business: "If you don't please your customers, don't worry. Somebody else will." The more you track, spam, open up to viruses, etc, your customers, the less they are pleased, and they will not play along with your games. Again, that is a fault of the business, not the customer. Don't complain to us if you failed because you chased away all of your customers/site visitors, or because they refused to play along with your invasive and potentially dangerous rules.

And before you make any claims about me, yes I do pay for online services. No, they are not some minor pocket-change expenses to me. If you complain that some people can't afford to host content they want to, that's like complaining that some people can't afford Ferraris. Boo frickin' hoo. As for them 'deserving' profit, there's no difference if people can't sustain a business online or offline; it doesn't come for free.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

I never had any complaint about the internet's quality of content. You claim that the internet of 20 years ago was a 'toy', yet I was showing that it had the same content and services as nowadays, complete with profitable international businesses and trade, free and for-pay fun stuff and socializing services, etc. This shows that the added advertising and money grubbing of today is not critical in any way to the internet's health. The addition of such people like you relying on this added garbage did not make it magically attain some different 'non-toy' status; the online content and services (both commercial and personal/social/academic) were already there, and are still progressing and developing regardless.

i promptly object to that. 20 years ago, it was 1987, and the concept was not even existent in its form today, it was merely a limited research facility. and even at 1994, when it was opened to commercialization, it was still an academic/research concept. the services and stuff back then were pathetically simple, not only that but most of them were running on academic infrastructures - backgammon servers, simple chat systems and so on. even at 1995-6, opening up a website for doing anything was a phenomenonal investment, nobody without ties and footing in the newly forming i.t. world already were going and setting up sites and services. even in 1997, getting a domain name alone for a year costed more than $250, when they finally made it 250 that year there was much talk "whoa how inexpensive domains are now". and dont even talk about hosting. you had a deep pocket to shell out amounts around $1000 back then.

in such an environment you cant service millions of people. and the solution came with investment - phenomenonal investment in companies like netscape, yahoo and altavista brought the internet to where it is. note that all of those are ad-supported services.

I never said that the internet should be cost-free. It is you who whine about internet hosting not being free, and want free money in return. People who host stuff are generally stuck with the cost, or endure the terms of service to piggyback on other people who already pay for hosting. If you can't afford to host your own content, or don't want to endure others' terms, or can't get customers or investors to pay for it, then too bad... you can't afford to do that online. You have no right to expect to be paid for simply having content online for free.

much contradiction here that i dont know where to start.

i am the one stating that enduring ads is another form of 'paying' for content. you were the one who was annoyed with 'enduring ads'. its a form of 'wanting for free'.

and again, such darwinian approaches are suicidal - lets see, there is a crop shortage now due to crops being used for fuel production. the prices of crops are going up. will you be content as to say "it is free market economy, fuel companies are paying more for crops, hence crops are not making it into bakeries, hence no bread. people should learn if they can not pay for bread, they will be hungry". similar situation is about the internet. if the ad supported concept which makes internet so big and so easy place to be for ordinary people goes away, internet will increasingly be a domain of mega corporations who can afford, and after a time they will easily turn it into a cable tv, removing freedom of information, right to choose concepts we now enjoy.

and this is the flies' problem, because we are the flies and the spiders too. if we ignore this situation, the birds will win, the natural predators for both of us, which are megacorps.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[White Flame]

About the history of the net, it's all just a matter of scale. I see it as equal systems on different scales, you see it as some quantum leap, whatever.

people should learn if they can not pay for bread, they will be hungry". similar situation is about the internet.

Look, what it boils down to is that you and others have positioned yourselves to be dependent on an unstable, unprotected, noncritical source of income (web ad revenues) on a shaky foundation of hoping that people use the net the same way as they always have. Out comes another Google or Skype or entrenched service bundle or some new well-funded thing in your own niche etc, and BAM, everyone's there and no ad revenue for you. Out comes pervasive ad blocking and legally-backed privacy protections, and BAM, no ad revenue for you. Sorry, but there is no protection for your type of income and if you're dependent on it, you've made a horribly short-sighted decision and have no right to complain about loss of revenue. Nothing will stop the web from changing around you and away from you if you're using something that people don't want (like invasive advertising). If you can make money before it doesn't work anymore, fine, but blogging and other such small-time sites are not some crucial service that will be protected, and it is no big loss to the world when those things fall from their current fad status to the wayside and niches again.

Remember all the "pay to surf" systems that were paying out decently? They're all gone, or pay out only pennies. Imagine if you depended on those for your living. That is exactly a Darwinistic "Oh no, I can't afford bread anymore!" scenario, but that's exactly what happened and people had to go somewhere else for income. A similar thing will happen with web ad revenues, and you'll be stuck complaining that they're gone with no protection from the change. It's already started: There is a real backlash to web advertising, and the funds for many sites _will_ continue to dry up and a lot of them _will_ fold. It's your own fault if you think that you can have long term funding from ads at a small site (even if it pays well now) and end up with nothing at the end of it because you didn't see that it wouldn't last. Everybody else sees it, which is why your complaints about dwindling ad revenues are largely scoffed.

I've pretty much had my say. I think both of us are starting to repeat ourselves.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[unity100]

Look, what it boils down to is that you and others have positioned yourselves to be dependent on an unstable, unprotected, noncritical source of income (web ad revenues) on a shaky foundation of hoping that people use the net the same way as they always have. Out comes another Google or Skype or entrenched service bundle or some new well-funded thing in your own niche etc, and BAM, everyone's there and no ad revenue for you. Out comes pervasive ad blocking and legally-backed privacy protections, and BAM, no ad revenue for you.

dont make assumptions. i am a web developer. i dont persist on ad revenue. and the above is not a good thing for people. its no different than a megacorp entering some area and eradicating all small shops then imposing its prices to everyone.

Sorry, but there is no protection for your type of income and if you're dependent on it, you've made a horribly short-sighted decision and have no right to complain about loss of revenue. Nothing will stop the web from changing around you and away from you if you're using something that people don't want (like invasive advertising). If you can make money before it doesn't work anymore, fine, but blogging and other such small-time sites are not some crucial service that will be protected, and it is no big loss to the world when those things fall from their current fad status to the wayside and niches again.

again, you are taking the matter like a 3rd year economics/business senior. the above can be only easily said with a lightheart in scenarios, simulations, projects, discussions and such. it cant be said in real life. because in real life, the effects of "free market" are real :

- french aristocracy were saying "let them eat cake if they cant find bread". (it is not certain that marie antoinette said this) look what happened then.

- "free market" it was back at 1929. look then what happened - 5 year long global recession, 2 new fascist countries, a world war and 15 million confirmed dead.

- again back to crop example, the concept of a famine is very real if the situation goes on like this, crops being bought to make fuel, and not making it into bakeries.

im again reciting - such an approach, which is fit for economy discussions and in college dorms, which states that 'if it doesnt work, let it die' is not fit for real world. because in real world, effects are irreversible, and in the cases they are, doing so costs much more time and effort and their money equivalents. losing the internet to megacorporations which will make it into another cable tv in which the free speech we know now is none is not something that can be remedied easily. and they are already trying to do it, by trying to push laws to their end. and you are suggesting that it is just allright that ordinary people be let fall out of the web's social and economic facet, further leaving the ground to megacorps because the interest in the web will wane and corps will dictate what goes.

this is rather "american" way of approach, the one you are making - "let the suckers die" "let the best win" "winner/loser" concept etc.

Remember all the "pay to surf" systems that were paying out decently? They're all gone, or pay out only pennies. Imagine if you depended on those for your living. That is exactly a Darwinistic "Oh no, I can't afford bread anymore!" scenario, but that's exactly what happened and people had to go somewhere else for income. A similar thing will happen with web ad revenues, and you'll be stuck complaining that they're gone with no protection from the change. It's already started: There is a real backlash to web advertising, and the funds for many sites _will_ continue to dry up and a lot of them _will_ fold. It's your own fault if you think that you can have long term funding from ads at a small site (even if it pays well now) and end up with nothing at the end of it because you didn't see that it wouldn't last. Everybo

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[cpm80]

At least I thought it was funny, but I'm just a guy who used up all his moderator points yesterday.

Trekkie Monster sez...

[abb3w]

What pisses me off are badly designed Flash ads.

They don't piss me off at all; I removed Flash from Firefox. If there's a site (porn) with flash-only (porn) content (porn) that I'm interested in (porn), I send the URL (porn) to a different web (porn) browser that still (porn) has Flash (porn) installed. Of course, it helps (porn) that there are a few (porn) stand-alone (porn) FLV video (porn) software viewers (porn) out there. As far as I can tell, Flash is only for ( Porn, porn, porn ) major time wasters.

For some of the more obnoxious JavaScript-based ones, I add 'em (like someone else suggested) to the /etc/hosts file. So far, only one has been IP based; some work with ROUTE was needed for that one.

OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[taiwanjohn]

This is only tangentially related to this thread, but... I've been getting an annoying delay in Firefox, when downloading files and I wonder if it's rare or common. Right between the time when I hit "save as" and the time when the download-progress dialog appears... Firefox freezes. Not just that one tab or window, and not the whole computer... just Firefox, and ALL of Firefox.

I tend to run 4 or 5 Firefox windows, with 8~10 tabs in each, so I'm giving it a workout, I know... but I've got 1GB of ram in this box, and that's plenty to keep my other programs happy. When this hang-up occurs, I can switch desktops and use my other applications, but when I switch back to the desktop with Firefox, if it's still "hung", it won't even repaint its client windows (just leaves artifacts from the previous desktop). Most of the time, this isn't much bother, but when you encounter a slow server or connection, it can make the entire browser unusable for 40 or 50 seconds each time.

As near as I can tell, the browser is waiting for the download to start, before it will display the progress dialog. And hey, that's fine with me... but WHY, for heaven's sake, does the ENTIRE BROWSER have to wait on that one slow website? Why can't I click on the download and forget about it, and go about browsing other pages? What POSSIBLE benefit is there in making me wait for some unknown web server to start spewing data, before I can get on with my business?

Has anyone else encountered this odd behavior?

Cheers,

--jrd

Re:OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[Joe Tie.]

Have you done a "clean up" on firefox's download manager in a while? I had a similar problem, and that did the trick for me.

Re:OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

That - is - exactly - why - I - went - to - Opera, and I'm much better now!

Re:OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[G Fab]

opera isn't really a decent competitor for firefox. It's a good browser, but it's just not in the same niche. With firefox, I can tinker with extensions and settings a lot more than with opera.

Re:OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[taiwanjohn]

Good call. Thanks! ;-)

--jrd

Re:OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a timeout problem with your local filesystem. Is Firefox trying to access a network drive, or do you have your network connections set properly?

Re:OT... does anyone else see this in Firefox?

[ajs318]

When the Source Code for Opera becomes available, maybe I'll think about installing it.

Proxy with low timeout for ads

[Jimithing DMB]

Has anyone considered using something like Squid as a web proxy with special properties for ad-serving domains? I am thinking something like using the normal timeout for normal sites but limiting the timeout to like 3 seconds on an ad-serving site. If it doesn't load in 3 seconds, just have the proxy return its standard timeout page.

That would allow most ads to pass, which I feel is a good thing because I don't want to penalize those who are doing the right thing. But for ad servers that can't keep up, it would just timeout and close the connection.

Re:Proxy with low timeout for ads

[multipartmixed]

You don't even need to have special properties for ad-serving domains -- put a short timeout on ALL domains and then use proxy-autoconfig to determine which sites get proxied and which don't.

Assuming you don't care about any of the other SQUID benefits (e.g. LAN-wide cache)

whitespace ads also piss me off

[jollyreaper]

To shift focus to another window I'll usually click somewhere in the non-linky whitespace. With the new whitespace ads these wankstains are including on the pages these days, I'll end up clicking on an ad link instead. Spin, little page-loading icon, spin. Then click a back to get to where I wanted to be and someone paid for an impression that never sunk in. May they choke in a pool of someone else's vomit.

I globally adblock the adservers

[WillAffleckUW]

if they use moving images, sound, or flash animation.

I'm sorry, if you can't serve up a static image, or use a small ad, you're going BYE!

Re:Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse

[DimGeo]

I simply made it temporarily allow the top-level domains. I.e. usually it's only the site's content. True, this doesn't help me if the top-level site has some malicious script on it, but it works without hassle.

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you get mod points. I haven't had the ability for easily five years now despite consistently having excellent karma.

Turning on pipelining

[claykarmel]

This was greek to me. Here's how.

Turn it on this way:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips

And information about how to access the secret tools (Why didn't I know this until now? I must be lame.)
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/edit#aboutc onfig

Proxomitron

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Proxomitron and be done with it. It runs in WINE for you Linux folks. It acts as a proxy and parses out what YOU choose not to see. With it being a proxy, the browser is irrevalent. I use Firefox and occsionally IE (for those stubborn pages) with all the secure browsing done via VWMare.

Re:Proxomitron

[TeknoHog]

Use Proxomitron and be done with it. It runs in WINE for you Linux folks.

Running an essential daemon inside Wine must be the worst idea I've heard since Vista. A native equivalent for Linux is Privoxy, formerly known as Junkbuster.

"onlythievesblockthem"

[Leperous]

Re. the logic that it's "stealing" to block ads: "1% of people seeing our adverts will buy something from it" does not mean that "1% of adverts seen by any given user result in a sale." Simply put, some people will not ever buy stuff from advertising, ever, and if anything, it's stealing from them. I see no problem in blocking ads if they're paying the host on a per-click basis, rather than per-view.

Re:"onlythievesblockthem"

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. That has to be the dumbest article tag I've seen in a long time. You "steal" absolutely nothing by blocking ads. I have a fairly extensive blacklist for AdBlock in Firefox and as a result, many pages load so much faster (as much as 5-10 times faster in some cases) that I really couldn't care less what it is they're advertising -- the time the ads are stealing from me is MUCH more valuable than some product advertisement that I have no interest in.

Privoxy solves the problem

[ksd1337]

For me, its Privoxy and neilvandyke's actionsfile that solves the ad problem.

Google analytics

[sherriw]

Considerate web developers will use a cron to cache the google urchin.js file and then serve it up locally. This way their website won't be stuck waiting to load it from google's overworked servers.

Re:Google analytics

[Ex Machina]

Uh, I'd wager that the majority of web users have urchin.js in their browser cache already.

Or

[LWATCDR]

Just don't use flash ads.
I unblocked doubleclick because some of the ads on Slashdot are things I am interested in. What do I see but flash banners!
I wish I could unblock the Slashdot ads but I can not stand animated ads!

What delays?

[LaminatorX]

I just cache all the adds locally. Problem solved!

Anycast

[AlexCV]

Why not anycast a bunch of distributed ad servers like some of the DNS root-servers? ISPs might well volunteer some rackspace at their main hubs to reduce backbone bandwith usage and increase customer satisfaction all in one go...

Re:Anycast

[pooh666]

How do you get around the problem with TCP? From what I understand ANYCAST doesn't work as well as with UDP, can't say I understand why, but that is what I have read.

get yourself a host file

[Anonymous Coward]

google "host file" -- ad servers and the spyware they are often guilty of installing will disappear. Makes for a much nicer surfing experience.

I cache my ads

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

I stared a website (DealsLab which is a lot like the much more popular TechDeals) not so long ago and found to be true exactly what the question addresses as I paid special attention to my website load time as an article had recently been up on Slashdot about website load time and how the average user is willing to wait about three seconds before giving up. Because of this I decided to write a php script that will resize (according to GET parameters) to scale the image and host the file until I dump the cache. The image URL is stored in a MySQL database, so anytime an individual visits a page with an un-cached image, it will attempt to re-cache the image and display it (or a 404). While this also has the advantage of circumventing the default settings of many ad blocking programs, I'm nice about how I do it and only use it for my 88x31px (microBar) sized ads.

Re:I cache my ads

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

I got heated and was going to post a snide comment, but you're absolutely right. That being said, I still would like to add that you're an ass. This is the internet and comments rarely get proofread. I certainly thought to proofread, but I know my grammar is not perfect and so I decided that it was not of importance in this situation. Having nothing better to do than to be a grammar Nazi on /. goes to show that you have too much time on your hands and that you lack the intelligence to know where to channel your talents in a more constructive manor. To put it simply, you are a waste of time.

IIS slowing down Digg

[Anonymous Coward]

Come to think of it, this could be used selectively to steer people away from certain sites or even certain articles. M$ just stomped Digg it to tying their revenue, their user logs and their rendereing speed to M$ cruft. Poor performace is jsut gravy compare to the other two. Yet, poor performance from the IIS-runing ad server will translate into poor performance for Digg. Problems are easily dismissed with a simple "oops sorry bout that" when M$ gets caught slowing down digg.

Re:IIS slowing down Digg

[Kalriath]

Shut the fuck up Twitter. You somehow manage to twist anything to being about MS don't you?

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you get mod points. I haven't had the ability for easily five years now despite consistently having excellent karma.

Perhaps that's the beauty of the metamoderation system?

Re:Ads? or Webmasters?

[KermodeBear]

I work for a large portal company that hosts websites for several big name cable providers. Our sites load up all advertisement data inside of iframes, so that the rest of the page doesn't suffer from a slowdown if an ad server is bogged down. At first it seemed like a big PITA to implement, but in retrospect it was a wise decision.

This certainly isn't something you would learn in school. It's one of those "learn from experience" type of things.

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Teun]

At least you get mod points. I haven't had the ability for easily five years now despite consistently having excellent karma. Interesting, how does an AC get karma?

Mr. Burns?

[antdude]

Is that you, Mr. Burns? --Mr. Smither

Re:Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse

[Emporer of Ice Cream]

You know, you can pay $5 CPM subscription to Slashdot to remove those ads, instead of using an ad blocker. Then you could be supporting a site that has given you what appears to be lots of value based on your profile.

Are you doing that? Or are you just scrubbing out the one way Slashdot has of recouping the costs of providing you with this service?

Awful for dial-up/slow Internet users.

[antdude]

I had to use dial-up last night because of an Internet outage. So, I used my good old fashion dial-up. And wow, it's SLOW with all the ads. The worse ones are those Flash, video ads, etc.

I'd argue they speed it up...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not generally a capitalistic whore, and I use an ad blocker myself. However, advertising is the primary revenue generator on the web, and revenue drives businesses which in turn invest in infrastructure. Infrastructure is critical to making things fast.

Sure, a site may occasionally respond less slowly due to an ad related technical snafu. But imagine using the same site if nobody paid to upgrade the infrastructure. Imagine Google without PPC, big fat pipes, or massive server farms.

Ad free web = permanently slashdotted web.

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[google]

Suuuuuuuuure ya do...

I've noticed this too

[Whuffo]

And I've got a solution. Each time I see that a page load is stalled waiting for an ad server (or an analytics server), I simply add that server to my AdBlock list. Problem solved.

127.0.0.2 is the machine next to yours

[billstewart]

I tend to reserve localhost for things that really _are_ on my local host.

I've heard that somebody makes a trivial webserver that 404s every request, so it's useful for pointing your ad requests to without wasting much CPU time or hitting the file system if you don't need to serve real web pages.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[caluml]

Yep, is that site some sort of ironic parody? Like using all the horrible nastiness it can find? Like a huge popover saying:

JavaScript is required to be enabled in your browser in order to view this website correctly. This site does not abuse JavaScript or any other technology as the primary purpose of this site is for educational purposes. This message will not disapear[sic] until you have enabled JavaScript and reloaded the page. Uh-huh. I'm not disabling NoScript for that gaudy, horrible looking site.

analytics is big

[Anonymous Coward]

we removed google analystics for that very reason. useful http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz e/ tool to check what scripts keep the site slow

Host ads locally. Side effect: less spyware/virii

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

What websites should do is start hosting the ads locally.

It makes it easier to track views. It makes the site load faster.

And best of all, it cuts down on spyware and viruses.

What self-respecting website admin is going to knowingly copy a spyware- or virus-laden advertisement to his/her server, knowing full well that his/her server may get infected in the process? Spyware may eventually become a thing of porn sites and ghost stories, if ads start getting local hosting.

Why ad servers won't give you a server-side script

[Anonymous Coward]

Ad serving networks don't want to use a bounce script on your web server because then they don't get THEIR cookies. Everything they do that's of any value is based on having cross-site cookies. If you were proxying the ad requests they'd be getting YOUR cookies. It goes farther -- some of the ad serving systems will use HTTP redirects to bounce the client through several tracking services before actually giving up the ad. Each of those tracking systems has its own domain and its own tracking cookies.

So that's the legitimate reason why they don't want you proxying. Oh, and they don't trust you!

Business,LLC,Inc,CO...Like the rest?

[chocbar31]

I believe they should have to petition and be licensed like every other business. That should help us, maybe.

They serve different ads to different people

[Joce640k]

They serve different ads to different people depending on location, country, etc.

I've seen sites which even decide whether or not to do popups based on location.

127.0.0.2, .3, etc. makes tracking sites easier

[billstewart]

I normally uselocalhost / 127.0.0.1 for stuff that's really supposed to be on my machine.

127.0.0.2, .3, etc. makes it easier to track the source of sites I'm killhostfiling, in case I care - are they stuff from an imported list, or stuff I've added explicitly?
Also, it's a bit more obvious that they're not pointing to the real system.

Then of course there was the famous troll about there being a bunch of Scientology documents at ftp://127.0.0.1/ :-)

As others have said: Adblocker + Firefox

[paulsomm]

To be honest I started using adblocker not because i didn't want to see ads. I didn't care about the banners and such originally. But then came the java applet ads, then the macromedia flash ads and I noticed the slowdown. Thats why I started. Although now I'd keep using it just because its jarring to use IE or a non-AdBlocked Firefox anymore. I noticed the other day when using IE from a machine that wasn't mine that the latest ad technique is a CSS float-over that pops up when your mouse goes over a link and,if you click the link, you're taken to the ad's site instead. Something for MS Live I believe.

Its crap like that that gives the ad industry a bad rep.

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[AndersOSU]

With funny mods. Always with funny mods.

doh

[unity100]

if it takes a MINUTE for /. to load, then you definitely have some issues with your own pc or your isp.

im living in turkey ffs, our minimum ping to abroad is 400 ms the least, one national monopolistic backbone provider, international lines congested due to overselling, yet i can still get slashdot in around 4 seconds tops.

Re:doh

[SharpFang]

Now, yes. They seem to have fixed the adservers. See my last journal.

oh yea

[unity100]

i definitely did. actually i, alongside many millions of users who were not hesitant to suck stuff have been able to bring internet to being the trans national concept it is today. it didnt happen on its own. wouldnt you like to suck some too ?

Alternative?

[mtxf]

Most of the posts ive seen so far are just people bashing ads and whining... which is all very well but is there not something which can be done about the ad problem?

How else can a small-time webmaster expect to pay for hosting and bandwidth?

Obviously a paypal donatation link is one possibility, but ive no idea how effective they actually are. Ads are (ignoring blocking software here) compulsory viewing, and so are guarrenteed to generate cash. Im guessing the % of visitors who donate is even smaller than the avg click-through rate on ads.

onLoad ads

[Bisente.COM]

Why not artificially deferring all the ads, external images, nifty effects, etc. until the content is fully loaded? Instead of all the scripts being run on the moment, make them register somewhere and launch them one by one from the body onload event.

I played around with the idea some time ago, it isn't difficult to implement. Mostly. Some 3rd party code is a PITA to adapt to this schema. Other than that, it worked: all the content loaded and was displayed at once, and then all the external imagery started showing.

Of course, for something like this to be really useful, some kind of API or standard should be in place, and all the adserving companies should adapt to it. Not likely.

yea

[unity100]

That's a market economy for you

yea. its just market economy for me. 1929 great depression was also a market economy case. look what happened because of it - fascists taking over in germany and italy and balkan states, poverty and despair everywhere, great struggle to get things back on their feet and finally a world war.

current u.s. subprime mortgage crisis is another market economy case too. but it have propelled itself into being a global crisis. now theres the talk of global recession. noone knows what will come after. maybe another 1929. and then god knows.

some stuff cant be left to 'market economy' in stupidly overdarwinian approaches. else things important to entire humanity may get jeopardized or entire civilization can be set back 20-30 years like in the case of wars.

internet is something much more important than many stuff that were around in 1929. so proposing that it may wither and rot just because some wimps do not like to forfeit some conveniences is just ignorance.

Re:yea

[Chandon Seldon]

some stuff cant be left to 'market economy' in stupidly overdarwinian approaches.

True enough. I don't think that any given ad-supported website is one of those things. And no, ad supported websites do not make up the entire internet. Further, declaring the threat to ad revenues from ad-blockers to be an economic threat on par with the great depression is absurd.

In any case, advertising revenues on the web aren't going anywhere. Advertisers will have to balance the benefits of obnoxious ads with the possibility of getting blocked by end users - and that's a good thing.

Re:yea

[unity100]

ad supported free service/content website concept is the reason that internet is the border-penetrating and above-nations entity it is today. non ad supported websites either belong to foundations, which are low in numbers, or belong to individuals. the latter wont be able to support the costs of maintaining a web site if their costs go high with increasing usage and shut down. as there is no concept of ad support anymore, such private sites will also go under or get sold/merged to big media corporation entities. as a result the internet will turn to something like the tv - some small percentage of decent websites which are founded and maintained on university/institution infrastructures, sites that belong to megacorps, and government stuff.

and as you see i wasnt relating ad supported websites to great depression, but this.

for your final comment, if advertisers remove obnoxious ads and go to less disturbing text ads and such, ad blocking software will start blocking them, and the spiral down will continue.

Re:yea

[Chandon Seldon]

That's one way things could happen, but it seems like a wildly unlikely scenario to me. Some people have been blocking web ads for as long as they have existed (that's more than 10 years now), and nothing horrible has happened to the web yet.

A much more likely scenario is this: Most people will remain completely unaware that web ads are optional, and they'll keep clicking on them and buying things. Those of us "in the know" will keep blocking annoying ads (even as we occasionally make ad driven purchases anyway; I recently bought a wicked lasers laser pointer due to a web ad I saw). I expect it to go on this way for a while, until the web gradually changes into whatever it will be next - and neither you or I has any idea what that will be.

Re:yea

[PenGun]

I haven't seen an ad in years. Well the Google text deal I guess. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to see them. I'm just as much a part of a market economy as anything else.

  You just can't expect the wolves to show up at shearing time ;).

Re:yea

[unity100]

That's one way things could happen, but it seems like a wildly unlikely scenario to me.

First, many unfortunate events in history of mankind were wildly unlikely scenarios before they happened.

Some people have been blocking web ads for as long as they have existed (that's more than 10 years now), and nothing horrible has happened to the web yet.

Yea, and thats a main factor that caused online advertisement's popularity and payout to fall very dramatically since the first years of the internet to a point where websites needed to fill up every possible space and resort to intrusive ads to get to remaining users in order to maintain viability maybe ?

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to always get mod points on Friday... when I'm not going to be on /. until Monday....

hosts file

[drDugan]

see
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

It's the Nut Behind the Wheel

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a total dickhead submits this to /.. At that point things are out of control because the editors of /. are total dickheads too. Either that or they like the rest of us enjoy seeing you make a total jackass out of yourself. In either case: turn off JS or use a Firefox plugin and don't submit to /. but GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS.

Slow adservers?

[Peet42]

I wouldn't know; I haven't requested a byte from an adserver so far this year.

I had to look.

[emseabrown]

You are absolutely correct.

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the beauty in that there is no accountability for meta-moderators?

iframe

[yintercept]

The iframe tag is the ideal mechanism for delivering ads. An iframe does a better job of separating content from the ad than just about anything else I've found. The iframe seems to let the page render first with the proper size for the ad.

Too bad it was deprecated by the W3C.

Block Those Suckers

[maz2331]

I block a ton of ad domains in my DNS server. Anyone in spyware/adware or serving up ads gets put into my DNS and mapped to an internal web server that just kicks back a "Ad Blocked" page for any URL. It works for me!

Another CUSTOM HOSTS PREBUILT (27,000 servers)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://forums.techpowerup.com/attachment.php?s=b05 c46a8779d67f610afc096711dc388&attachmentid=6540&d= 1172567412

27,000 adbanner servers blocked, fully alphabetized internally (for easier seeks when adding/deleting entries when needed )

This file helps protect against lags online calling out to your DNS to resolve web addresses of your fav sites (since you can speedup your favs in it, documented inside, look with notepad.exe to see on how to do this & why)

This file helps speed you up, in resolving bannerads IP/UNC to the DNS also

This file helps speed you up, by stopping the loading & running banner material from adbanner servers, slowing yourself down

This file provides protection vs. malicious javascript bearing banners

====

INSTALLATION DIRECTIONS:

1.) To replace the one you use now, simply first backup your original one located here:

%WinDir%\system32\drivers\etc

TO HOSTS.OLD, & then unzip this one into that same subfolder!

----

2.) On Windows 2000, you will need to reboot for it to take effect... but, on Windows XP/Server 2003, the IP stack is 'dynamically loaded/reloaded' & "plug-N-play" driver design, so it takes effect nearly immediately.

----

3.) NOTES ON HOW IT WORKS & HOW TO FULLY USE IT - It is FULLY internally documented on HOW to use it. You can examine & edit it using notepad.exe & add your favorite sites to it to speedup access to them & be able to reach them even IF your DNS 'goes down' @ your ISP/BSP as well.

A.) ACTIVATING, EDITING, & UPDATING THE INACTIVE FAVORITE SITES TO SPEEDUP SECTIONS:

The ping command is used for this with notepad.exe... this is noted inside the file, with step-by-step examples thereof.

I mention this, because I leave the section where you add in your favorite sites # "Unix Style" commented off & they MAY be out of date in terms of the IP Address currently used for that particular site, if you use the ones I have in there now commented off!

(Ms' IP stack IS based off the BSD model & thus, why the UNIX comments exist & work in it)

That is so you can add your own personal favorites.

B.) NOTES on "AS IS" FUNCTIONALITY (USING IT AS IT SHIPS, W/ FAV. SITES INACTIVE):

The adbanner blocking portion IS active however, the moment you start using it. This leaves it flexible for folks in both capacities.

Again - It is also FULLY internally alphabetized in addition to being organized into diff. sections, so hunting down servers that may already exist in it for blocking adbanners is easier!

This is so you can add new ones easily IN alphabetical order, or find them so you do NOT have 'double entries' (no big deal, because once it is loaded by your local dns cache, it removes those, but the shorter it is, the faster it is loaded!))

Nice part of this is, you go faster resolving URL-> IP address equations, far faster than calling out to your DNS from your ISP/BSP when you use it, & if that server goes down? You STILL can reach them!

====

(Again - Step-by-Step examples are in the file of all things it can do & how/why it does them, & how YOU can add to it easily!)

Enjoy a faster & safer internet experience using this file... it DOES help on both security & speed accounts!

APK

Privoxy, Adblocker & NoScript

[avicarmi]

Privoxy can also be installed on windows, it is browser independent.

Re:Privoxy, Adblocker & NoScript

[avicarmi]

sorry, forgot to add the link to Privoxy
http://www.privoxy.org/

Re:Host ads locally. Side effect: less spyware/vir

[amRadioHed]

I think the problem with that is the webmaster needs to be trusted to report their ad view statistics honestly. Problem for the hucksters that is, not for me.

Re:Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the idea. Noscript uses a "whitelist". It blocks scripting on ALL sites unless you specifically allow those sites.

I personally love it! Client side scripting is becoming more and more of a danger. If you look at a lot of the recent browser security problems, many have been client side scripting exploits.

So I know I for one prefer to only script on sites I trust. The rest get blocked. That's fine by me and I don't consider it a hassle at all. In fact, I won't even use a browser on my box without Noscript! I even stopped using Opera because of it.

I see a good speedup with ads turned off

[ChrisA90278]

Here is what I did: Set up a proxy server that checks a list of URLs and sends a one bit transparent GIF image in place of a listed URL. Other URLs get proxied. Now I point my browser, be it IE, Safari or Firefox at the proxy and no more ads. but beter then that no more waiting for ads. The trick of sending the one bit gif works well and lets the pages render in the browser normally. There are any number of ad blockers that work like this most of them run under squid.

When I turn theis feature on and off I notice a lage difference in appearent speed and also I'n no longer bothered by these stupid Flashbased ads.

I support Slashdot with my comments.

[Futurepower(R)]

I'm supporting Slashdot by writing somewhat well-researched comments.

Save the Planet

[bill_mcgonigle]

this ad on my local newspaper's site that took 80% of my CPU

Most CPU's peg their wattage when they get that much usage. So the flash ads not only cost your money, they burn coal and contribute to global warming.

Flashblock for the sake of the Planet.

Free websites

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a lot of talk about free software, where you shouldn't be restricted to the usage. What about websites? I don't like ads, I really hate ads. I use firefox with adblock and love it. I even use slashdot without paying, and blocking all the ads. Why? Because I think websites also should be free, free for me to use.

I run a puzzle site, with lots of puzzles (http://www.menneske.no/eng/). There are no ads on the page. I don't earn a dime for all the millions of requests each month. I pay for my internet connection, but still I don't want to earn anything on the site. If people want to pay, because they like it, they can, but I don't want users to see ads on my page. I could have earned thousands each month on ads, but I want free webpages.

Think of all the programs with GPL license. If they said you either had to look at ads or pay if you liked it to use it, what would we say? We don't like it on programs, but we almost enforce it on websites. I don't like it at all. Websites should be free, free to use, free of ads.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[hairykrishna]

They're right. It hurts my eyes AND my ears.

Agreed...especially when I've got 20 tabs open

[WoTG]

I don't mind Flash in general either, actually, I developed a few little things for Flash (not ads). I often have a lot of tabs open in FF... like 20. It all works perfectly fine until one ad decides to choke the system. Bleah... time to get a dual core laptop I guess.

FWIW, I wish Firefox had a way to throttle each tab to some max % of CPU.

YSlow

[m2943]

It depends on how the page is written.

If you want to know more about what the page is hanging on, get YSlow.

I'm assuming that most sites actually want to serve the ads first.

http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/

[di0s]

I use this in addition to adblock and filterset.g: http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/

Somethingawful's take

[JimboFBX]

Somethingawful.com has good way of getting people to see ads- they serve funny spoof ads most of the time and occassionally serve a legitimate ad every once in a while. Spoof ads like "Follow the circle with a quarter and win a new monitor!"

A possible solution...

[dantezco]

... is the use of layers.

One could place the actual code for the ads in the bottom of the html document, and use layers and CSS to place them on the intended spot. Like I do in my weblog, posts always come first, then the sidebar. Makes a world of difference.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, consider this constructive criticism, blunt though it is: Your site sucks. If you've invested money in it, perhaps you ought to fix it?

This has nothing to do with the sites of the people who criticized you and everything to do with your site. Responding to criticism of one site with criticism of another site or poster is either a completely nonsensical response, or an ad-hominem attack.

This is my user experience on an average "blog" website(that of the GP):

calum.org
The first thing I notice is that the colour scheme. It's well-designed aesthetically(though very bright), but it is low-contrast; it's not very easy to read the blue/grey text on a bluish background. Furthermore, the design makes presumptions about font size and so breaks for me with my default font size(I'm myopic and I like to read the screen from a distance).

Still, I allow my eyes a few moments to adjust to the colours, lower the font size(moving closer to the screen) and move on.

I'm easily able to subconsciously identify the main elements of the screen: a menu on the top, a bit of info on the left, a login pane on the right, and the familiar list of blog posts in the middle.

After a few seconds, I've identified what this site is(a personal blog) and how I can use it("Read more" links and "Add comment" links). I'm comfortable enough with the layout to use it.

Now, this is my brain on your site:

First thought: as the other mentions, the colour scheme is frankly reminiscent of a "shady" site. (By this I mean an "underground" site - such as those used in the field of software piracy before it became cool. Irrational though it may be, my second thought is that I'm in agreement with the guy who said he wouldn't install anything from that sort of site. (Frankly, I didn't even want to enable Javascript.)

Of course, the second visual impression is the huge box which tries to force me("This message will not disapear [sic] until...") to enable scripting. I don't, because this site has already demonstrated that it's willing to annoy me, and I know there are plenty of opportunities for further annoyance if I enable JavaScript. (By the way, I'm used to NoScript: if your menu links don't work without JavaScript, I don't get mad as hell and won't take it anymore and bother you about it, I enable JavaScript temporarily to make it work, as long as the site looks reasonably trustworthy. A non-intrusive, informative message helps(it especially would if I wasn't already familiar with the situation); an attempt at forcing me is counter-productive.)

Now, I get to admire the site from afar. There's a garish purple "smoke" background graphic which makes the header text hard to read. The text is high-contrast, but the colour choices are, as mentioned, positively offensive.

There's mention of music: boy are you glad I had NoScript enabled, or this would be a lot more negative. I do not want music to play in my web browser without my explicit consent, and I suspect no-one else has appreciated this trick in the last seven years.)

First impressions are over: this is the point where I'd leave the site in disgust(and did, before I decided to go back and post a more thorough review to explain the point of view of the other commenters). I've failed to understand what the website is for(my best guess at this point is "something drug-related" due to the psychedelic experience), and I have absolutely no desire to interact further with it.

Instead, I come back and turn my attention to the menu on the right. Scratch that, that's not actually a menu; it's a collection of random web-related things. (The most useless, apart from the ever-hopeful webmaster's suggestion that I donate money (up to 5,000 USD) to the creator of this monstrosity, is the ability to validate the pag

HOSTS

[Anonymous Coward]

HOSTS. file. No more problems. thousands of ad-servers listed. no ads for me. :)

Re: Stingy Hardware and productivity

[TaoPhoenix]

Except sometimes they even KNOW the policy is trashing productivity, but someone at a senior buying level "enjoys" playing power games with office supplies.

My answer: sometimes it pays just to buy some things yourself. I got my first experiences as a temporary worker just to get into the work world. Some company tried to pawn off a broken adding machine on me. I asked nicely to get a newer one, and was turned down. (These things are only $30 each.)

I shrugged, and dug into my supply of interesting objects. Out came a 1970's Monroe electro-mechanical model I had named the Big Brown Beast and kept as a joke. Hitting a key sounded like a train track switching.

Of course, they were not amused. I, however, was.

"That thing makes a racket! Can you get it out of here?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand your question. I need an adding machine to run tapes. The one you gave me is broken. I brought in my own. Would you like to give me a new adding machine now?"

They lasted a week, and then caved.

Simple Solution

[ajs318]

Install a proxy server and use it to block out the advert servers. This is what I have in my /etc.squid/squid.conf:

acl adverts url_regex doubleclick
acl adverts url_regex servedby\.advertising\.com
acl adverts url_regex fastclick\.net
acl adverts url_regex tribalfusion\.com
acl adverts url_regex falkag
acl adverts url_regex valueclick\.com
acl adverts url_regex burstnet\.com
acl adverts url_regex floppybank\.com
acl adverts url_regex freepush.\com
acl adverts url_regex googlesyndication\.com
acl adverts url_regex intellitxt
acl adverts url_regex questionmarket\.co

acl trackers url_regex 112.2o7.net
acl trackers url_regex sitemeter.com
acl adverts url_regex googleanalytics\.com

http_access deny adverts
http_access deny trackers

I'm actually seriously thinking of offering an advert-busting proxy as a paid-for Internet service. I've already worked out how to collect the money on it and accept submissions of new sites. I know that people would rather pay money than see adverts (or else, how do you explain the popularity of Sky Plus?)

opera does not mean no ad filtering

[Anonymous Coward]

that's not because i use opera that i do not use any filtering ad program. i use a proxy named bfilter. it's awesome because it does not need any list of some sort. and it filters most of the javascript ads.

i could use it with konqueror(which has its own block app too) or ie too.

that's really dumb to want to discriminate firefox because of adblock as if there is no other way to block ads...

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[caluml]

caluml: Horizontal scrollbar in a GECKO browser, only over-zealous privacy advocates and perverts disable JavaScript. Your site is weak-sauce as is anything you even think would stand up as a viable criticism of my work. My site is Drupal powered. Why they can't wrap the site "tag" if it's too long isn't anything I care to worry about. I don't uphold my site as a bastion of web excellence like you do. It's just my homepage, for me to write about stuff I think of. I'm all for webpages being compliant [X]HTML - if mine isn't though, as long as it looks OK in Firefox, I'm fine.

So you're saying I'm a pervert because I disable Javascript? Nice logic there, Batman.

Your "News" box looks absolutely awful in Firefox on Linux. Just thought I'd let you know. All the bits overlap.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[caluml]

You Sir, are an intelligent, lucid, and well-written AC. I hope that you have a Slashdot account, and are just posting anonymously for this post, as you make good points, written well. If you don't have an account, please make one.

Glad someone speaks up

[rfc822]

I'm really glad this topic comes up. Just a short glimpse on my job and the people I work with: we provide health care information in Austria. To all people. For free. No registration. No paying for any user. But wait, you can get the health care information elsewhere? Probably. What about Wikipedia? Wikipedia is the source, no doubt. But we aim to produce information people actually can understand. Easy language. For the masses. Wikipedia aims for perfection, for hard facts.
So, what about the fuzz I'm spraying here? No money involved, though we got: editors, to grab the latest news from the health environment, check the facts, enhance existing articles or write new ones; we got our hoster who we have to pay monthly; we got a technical department to enhance our platform; we got our mindmaster, designer and creativity team.
We don't want to get rich. We all believe strongly we're wearing the white hat in our business. Unfortunately this doesn't bring money.

Advertisement does.

So we got this fullbanner, skyscraper, content add, buttons. All over the place. Now guess what. If I disable all this advertisement stuff, I get page loads < 500ms. That is good, if you still have fancy graphical stuff and JS stuff going on. This are not and cannot be static pages, unfortunately, or we would have < 100ms of course.

Now with the ads enable, I get roughly 1,5 to 2s. Great. Sometimes even without ads served. Even greater. Some ads aren't absolute positioned or they cannot be. the must be within the flow of the content. Guess what? Loading them externally even creates visual breaks when page is built in front of the user.

I've had already multiple meetings with our Adserver fighting about the performance. Since we've already switched to another ad hoster in the past due to corporation strategies and stuff, I know that one ad hoster is like another. IMHO when you know what your ob is performance and experience wise for the user, having an adserver is the worst thing which can happen. And there's no way around it. They day we switch off ads I get move to another company; sadly. But health care information needs to be free. So that's the trade off: we believe in what we do and how we provide it but therefore our user experience will never be what we would like to have for them.

an error

[Anonymous Coward]

google analytics isnt an ad system, google adsense is but not google analytics -pp

Subscribe

[Chemisor]

Now if you were nice, and bought a subscription, you wouldn't see any ads either. If everyone did it, then eventually ad-supported content would go extinct and we could all breathe easier.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[Anonymous Coward]

tsssk, get a life and read a book on usability

Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a better question: why not start a handful of threads to pull down different files? So what if the ad server is taking too long? The answer isn't blocking slow servers; the answer is proper programming.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[Khaed]

I'm not "on the bandwagon", but here are some honest criticisms:

Some sort of audio plays on your site, from the link you provided in your original post. That's a big no-no for me. It took me a second to figure out what the hell it was (with a few tabs open), at first I thought something was wrong with the audio feed I was already listening to. I paused that, and checked your site three times. It's definitely you.

Also, I have javascript enabled only for sites I allow. Audio playing despite that is not going to get me to turn javascript on in Noscript for your site.

You basically called me either an over-zealous privacy advocate or a pervert there, but the real reason is simple: Most uses of javascript are either unnecessary, stupid, irritating, or malevolent, and it's generally a combination of these.

Just to see what happened, I allowed javascript. The only change was that it offered to turn audio off. This should be the default option. Your apparent use of javascript falls under the first case above: unnecessary.

Also, the images behind your headers are nice enough, but the contrast with the text isn't pleasant.

Finally, threatening to take your ball and go home after being insulting isn't going to endear you to anyone.

If that was the case

[FoamingToad]

surely it'd be kLeptomaniac, no?

The very reason Ad-Block exists

[nobuddy]

Most users don't care about ads. A few, like pop-up and pop-under are worthy of a Casino style cornfield beat down to their inventor... but in general they are not a problem. However, since they load SO slow, adblocker is a popular tool for speeding up web browsing. Before Adblocker was installed, a particular page I visit daily took 10-25 seconds to load in the morning. After the install, it takes less than 3 seconds to load. That alone is reason enough to block ads. If they exceed their ability to serve ads, they deserve the lost revenue. Anyone else turned on the the image of every spammer and infinite popup creator getting beat down in a cornfield?

Re:Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse

[Elwood P Dowd]

Right, but not running a script shouldn't slow page load. I get the idea it's doing blocking io every time you go to a new page, which isn't cool.

You are not blinding me with science.

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[1s44c]

Thats the ugliest webpage I've seen for a very long time.

Adverts look pretty after looking at that.