Ad blockers?

15th August 2024

Are you fed up with being constantly bombarded with ads on your computer, or phone? Especially those headache inducing video ads, that leap around all over your screen?

Well Ad Blockers are useful software tools, or browser extensions, designed to prevent these ads from appearing and thus enhancing your experience by reducing distractions, improving page load times, using less data and increasing privacy.

They work by analysing the content of web pages and comparing elements against a list of known ad servers and ad scripts, filtering out any elements identified as undesirable.  They can also use custom CSS rules to hide or remove ads from the page and users themselves can often customize ad blockers by adding specific sites to blacklists, or whitelists (allow ads).

Are there any disadvantages to using an Ad Blocker? Yes, but really only for the advertisers, although there is the potential for non-ad content to get filtered out, or some website functionality to be disrupted. It should be remembered, however, that a lot of free content is only free because of ad revenue. Fortunately, some ad blockers participate in the "Acceptable Ads" program, which allows non-intrusive ads to be displayed, balancing user experience with supporting content creators.

Before we all gaily skip off to research which is the best free ad blocker – Google has announced changes to Chrome’s extension support that will prevent uBlock Origin (one of the most popular AB’s) from working. Thus future Chrome updates will automatically disable this particular AB. UBlock has already developed a (partial) work-around and, no doubt, Google is already working on blocking it. And so the dance continues!

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