Don't use ad blockers if you like AnandTech.

[speg]

Earlier this evening my SO opened Firefox which loaded her homepage (yahoo). She then tried to open a bookmark from the bookmark menu, but the mouse was terribly sluggish and she started cursing it. I looked over and saw a flash ad on the yahoo page, and immediately told her it was the flash ad.

She argued with me that yahoo has had flash ads before and it's never been sluggish like this, but I persisted and she re-enabled AdBlock (she disables it to watch her soap on cbs.com but doesn't always re-enable it). As if by magic her Athlon64 X2 4400+ machine was no longer sluggish!

Fuck flash ads! :thumbsdown:

Agreed. I don't use AdBlockers but I do use a FlashBlocker.

 

[Jeff7]

Earlier this evening my SO opened Firefox which loaded her homepage (yahoo). She then tried to open a bookmark from the bookmark menu, but the mouse was terribly sluggish and she started cursing it. I looked over and saw a flash ad on the yahoo page, and immediately told her it was the flash ad.

She argued with me that yahoo has had flash ads before and it's never been sluggish like this, but I persisted and she re-enabled AdBlock (she disables it to watch her soap on cbs.com but doesn't always re-enable it). As if by magic her Athlon64 X2 4400+ machine was no longer sluggish!

Fuck flash ads! :thumbsdown:

From a single Flash ad? I'll only get high CPU usage (confined to a single core of my C2D) if I'm playing some Flash game and scale the thing up to fill a good portion of the screen. But it never makes my cursor slow down.

 

[lxskllr]

From a single Flash ad? I'll only get high CPU usage (confined to a single core of my C2D) if I'm playing some Flash game and scale the thing up to fill a good portion of the screen. But it never makes my cursor slow down.

I think it was Flash that was locking up Firefox earlier for me. I just installed FlashBlock, and I'll try leaving non Flash ads.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

From a single Flash ad? I'll only get high CPU usage (confined to a single core of my C2D) if I'm playing some Flash game and scale the thing up to fill a good portion of the screen. But it never makes my cursor slow down.

I just confirmed it, an ad on the yahoo main page right now (H&R Block). Adblock Plus enabled, everything is fine. With ABP disabled the mouse is sluggish, and firefox.exe is using 55-65% CPU. Re-enabled and firefox.exe drops to 0% CPU!

EDIT>> I don't actually disable ABP (requires restart), I simply disable the EasyList filter.

 

[Leros]

Here is an idea. How about a "friendly" ad "manager"?

It would do two things:

1) Delay ad loading until the page content has loaded. This would eliminate long page loads.

2) It would have a voting-style block list. At first all ads would be allowed. When you block an ad on your local machine, it sends a vote to block that ad. If an ad gets enough votes, it goes on the block list for everybody.

This system would allow the non-obnoxious ads to stay, while not delaying page load times. And the obnoxious ads would be filtered out by the voting block list.

What do you guys think?

 

[lxskllr]

Here is an idea. How about a "friendly" ad "manager"?

It would do two things:

1) Delay ad loading until the page content has loaded. This would eliminate long page loads.

2) It would have a voting-style block list. At first all ads would be allowed. When you block an ad on your local machine, it sends a vote to block that ad. If an ad gets enough votes, it goes on the block list for everybody.

This system would allow the non-obnoxious ads to stay, while not delaying page load times. And the obnoxious ads would be filtered out by the voting block list.

What do you guys think?

I could live with that. Like I said, I don't even care about ads so much. It's when they affect(sometimes severely) the browsing experience, is when I give them the boot.

 

[Zebo]

Is there a way to get the ads without actually seeing them?
Is there a way to script occasional "click troughs" for more money without "seeing" those either?

 

[AnonymouseUser]

From a single Flash ad? I'll only get high CPU usage (confined to a single core of my C2D) if I'm playing some Flash game and scale the thing up to fill a good portion of the screen. But it never makes my cursor slow down.

Here's the offending ad. Check your CPU usage before and after loading it (sadly, clicking that link will give yahoo extra ad impressions).

 

[santz]

you can add an exception in your ad block to allow anandtech forums

 

[dennilfloss]

Here's the offending ad. Check your CPU usage before and after loading it (sadly, clicking that link will give yahoo extra ad impressions).

Whoa! That ad used 73% of my Phenom II and locked Avant Browser tight after a while.

 

[frostedflakes]

Agreed. I don't use AdBlockers but I do use a FlashBlocker.

Yup, have Flashblock on my netbook, because those ads really suck up a lot of cycles on an Atom CPU. Never bothered on my desktop, though, flash ads don't stress it too much.

 

[Jeff7]

Here's the offending ad. Check your CPU usage before and after loading it (sadly, clicking that link will give yahoo extra ad impressions).

The hell? I get 80% on my 2.4GHz C2D when loading that in Firefox. Firefox has never given me more than 50% - it doesn't seem to be multi-core capable.

One hell of an ad there though. I'd hate to think what something like that would do to my mom's PC - it's running an AMD 800MHz Tbird.
(Yes, she runs Firefox, with ABP.)

My cursor movement wasn't affected at all though.

 

[pyonir]

Is AnandTech in financial trouble?

I was a subscriber back in the day...I've done my share. Ads stay blocked.

 

[Kwatt]

Random thought:

If there was a whitelist for ABP of sites that only used text ads or not so annoying ads I would use it.

Or whitelisted ad delivery sites that adhere to a set of rules.

Maybe a menu of what type ad each person would allow. (What I find annoying will be different than what annoys others.)

Seems marketing people would support this knowing the ads would be not be blocked.

From my reading about this it seems the number of people using Adblockers is small but growing. So it might be too small a number to bother with. On the other hand if it is growing fast enough it may be too late for them to adapt.




.

 

[BUTCH1]

Here's the offending ad. Check your CPU usage before and after loading it (sadly, clicking that link will give yahoo extra ad impressions).

Yikes!, 73% usage here, 3Ghz C2D 4G ram, both cores showed busy although I'm not sure if that's accurate. If I were using my bedroom PC (Celeron dual core@2Ghz, 2Gb ram) it might cause a noticeable slowdown. What kind of idiot codes an ad that does that?, it's going to drive people away in droves if their machines start chocking trying to handle that..

 

[CKent]

On top of the already-stated reasons for blocking ads, on another forum I visit there was quite a row because the flash ads contained malicious script, and for quite some time before the administrators did something about it. Blocking ads saved me the trouble of having to worry about it (I use noscript, but still), and loading & hiding them (eg. Chrome) wouldn't have protected me as well as blocking them entirely.

Ads would be fine if they were handled by humans and not scumbags.

 

[irishScott]

I actually have no problem with basic border/banner ads, it's the popups and the crap that slides across the screen that gets me.

 

[Locut0s]

I actually have no problem with basic border/banner ads, it's the popups and the crap that slides across the screen that gets me.

Non animated banner ads are fine but so many of them nowadays are flash based ads that flicker and flash or god for bid have sound. It's just too distracting.

 

[dmcowen674]

Every cycle's sacred. ()
Every cycle's great. :awe:
When a cycle's wasted,
I get quite irate!

How dare you covet those cycles

 

[dguy6789]

Here's the offending ad. Check your CPU usage before and after loading it (sadly, clicking that link will give yahoo extra ad impressions).

Wow, that's absurd.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

block all crap

 

[mav451]

Here is an idea. How about a "friendly" ad "manager"?

It would do two things:

1) Delay ad loading until the page content has loaded. This would eliminate long page loads.

2) It would have a voting-style block list. At first all ads would be allowed. When you block an ad on your local machine, it sends a vote to block that ad. If an ad gets enough votes, it goes on the block list for everybody.

This system would allow the non-obnoxious ads to stay, while not delaying page load times. And the obnoxious ads would be filtered out by the voting block list.

What do you guys think?

That makes too much sense, so no probably won't come to fruition

I'm still in shock after reading the comments in the DOI article, before the Ars staff deleted those comments - I'm talking hundreds of comments. The antagonism displayed by Caeser/Clintology and others was just shocking. I think it's safe to say that if a website I visited ever had staff come out as rudely as that, I would gladly delete my bookmark to that site and openly spread the word for people to do the same.

Now I was about to spread the word on Saturday morning, until I read comments dated around maybe 8 or 9AM where Caesar unapologetically explained "oh we turned that off for now."

And I've read the comments (now in 800's) for their article on Adblocking. You can see how they're unwillingly to make any effort on their readership regarding Flash-intensive ads. Lol @ that.

Even if they do some reputation mitigation in the next few weeks, I'm never gonna forget what I read on that Friday afternoon.

 

[StevenYoo]

I just white-listed AT on my adblocker.

 

[techs]

I only use my FF with ad blocker on days ATOT is particulary slow. The ads really kill the site when that happens.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

My cursor movement wasn't affected at all though.

Yeah, mine wasn't affected either, with Opera or Firefox on Linux, though the CPU was hitting 44-64% between the two. I don't know why the SOs was so sluggish, though I suspect Vista had something to do with it.

The hell? I get 80% on my 2.4GHz C2D when loading that in Firefox.

Yikes!, 73% usage here, 3Ghz C2D 4G ram, both cores showed busy although I'm not sure if that's accurate.

Whoa! That ad used 73% of my Phenom II and locked Avant Browser tight after a while.

The CPU usage is simply unacceptable. I cannot and will not ever suggest people stop blocking flash ads, and I will not support sites in other ways when they force shit like that on their users. I do use Yahoo a few clicks a day, but I have so many of their ads blocked that parts of the site simply don't work, and I don't care to have them working.

To the guys at Ars Technica, they can suck an egg for all I care. I will accept basic text ads for most sites, and for my favorite sites I will, for now, try to accept silent, non-animated ads.