It’s amazing what people will put up with when they think it’s the norm, and it’s amazing how amazed one can get when they know something can be different. I don’t normally surf the net in windows, but I did a bit ago, for whatever reason. What I saw simply shocked me. Pop up ads, pop under ads, stupid javascript DHTML flash annoying things that would fly onto the screen over the page that I was reading.
How the hell do you put up with it?
Seriously, dealing with that would drive me stark raving mad. I’m all for people being able to sell their product, but come on! I use a browser called Galeon, based on Mozilla (ex-Netscape, or these days, netscape without all the AOL crap that is installed with netscape 5, erh, 6, erhm, 7). It supports a way to turn off pop ups. It allows popups to be opened in tabs, so that I see them and can close them at my leisure (without actually ever seeing more than the title should I choose to allow them).
Mozilla also doesn’t support the stupid DHTML flying ad things, or maybe more likely, the makers of them don’t support Mozilla. Either way, the only time I’ve seen one is in IE. Fight whatever holy wars you want about browser standards, but anything that means I don’t have to have someone’s idea of “eye catching” (“it’ll be eye catching, not annoying at all!” I’m sure they said) bothering me, and believe me, they bother me.
Galeon also supports something else that is sure to scare anyone dependant on banner ads (most everyone these days), the ability to right click on an image and “block images from server”. This means that you can simply right click on a banner ad from say “ads.foo.com”, right click on it, choose “block images from ads.foo.com” and never see another image from them (there is an allow image from server as well, in case you make a mistake). This means that many more pages are ad free for me, with just happy happy joy joy whitespace.
I’m beginning to think that news aggregator systems are the way to go for some pages. Like foz has, just get all the pages you read fed in so you can read them how you want. I know that foz, tig, engel and I had many lively debates over the “display how the user wants to see” vs “display how the creator intended”, but the ability to cut out crap and see the information and not the cruft and chrome that is just fucking forced down our throats these days in the name of commercialism, socialism, and whatever the hell else people use to justify “pissing off people”.