Goodbye page breaking ads, thank you AdBlock
AdBlock Plus is a necessity for me to browse at home these days. For the past few years I’ve felt the net is oversaturated with ads, but what finally pushed me over the edge was the relatively recent trend of full screen flash adverts.
I’m not talking about the splash screen ads that you have to view before proceeding to your content, as is the case with Salon and a few others. I’m talking about ads that take up a small, traditional piece of real estate like a top banner or a side skyscraper. Then, when you express interest in them by clicking or sometimes mousing over them, they expand. This is often done by positioning the ad to the top layer, making it huge to cover everything, and then putting transparency in flash.
My issue? Transparency doesn’t work in flash for linux yet. I don’t blame Adobe for this. They’ve been working with the Mozilla folks on this for a while. I do blame advertisers for their lack of consideration. For a while when I was visiting Canada.com to check my email I’d only see a big white box and a tiny ad at the top of the screen. I refreshed and was greeted with a different ad but the same problem. I was very, very annoyed. I know that people browsing the net with linux isn’t a very big segment for developers to consider, but of all users it’s only 0.5% behind Macs as of May 2007. It was on par in November 2005.
There’s still no fix for the transparency issue and I don’t know when it will be fixed. In the meantime I’m living ad-free. It’s a lot nicer this way.
4 Comments to “Goodbye page breaking ads, thank you AdBlock”
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I was really glad the day I got ad block plus. I’ve probably blocked a hundred annoying sites’ ads by now. And flash ads are really the irritant ones, even the ones in Yahoo! mail
Hello webmaster
I would like to share with you a link to your site
write me here preonrelt@mail.ru
I find some ads annoying such as the flash ones that cover up content, but on the other hand I realize that many of my favorite sites rely on advertising to survive.
Most respectable web masters will take the time to control and restrict the flash ads that interfere with their content (Google adSense lets you see the targeted flash ads and give them the axe if you so choose) and usually a well placed email to the webmaster fixes things for everyone.
I’d hope so but had no such luck with Canada.com. I e-mailed them to complain that their webmail locked out Linux users by an errant user-agent check, and I also mailed them about the ads that broke the page. No response. I even went Help->Report Broken Web Site in firefox and hoped they had more clout. No luck there either.
I guess Canada.com doesn’t care about Linux users.