Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Could Adblock be built into the browser? · 2006-08-07 16:10 by Wladimir Palant
Daniel Goldman from Opera Watch wrote Why Opera wouldn’t include an AdBlock feature in the browser claiming that no browser vendor would ever include ad blocking functionality in their core browser. This claim looks a little strange given that Opera already added ad blocking functionality with the release of Opera 9. Also, ad blocking has been a built-in feature of Mozilla Suite and Firefox virtually forever even though it isn’t as powerful as Adblock (images can be blocked by domain).
One has to read to the end of the article to understand why Daniel thinks these solutions are different from Adblock. First difference is naming — “content blocker” is less offensive than “ad blocker”. Second he mentions the necessity to “train” the blocker, it doesn’t come with predefined filters out of the box.
So, what is the big threat if somebody should ever include an effective ad blocker in a browser? According to Daniel Goldman the sites that are deprived their revenues will start blocking that browser explicitly. And this is a situation nobody would be happy with.
Well, I disagree. I don’t think that advertising sites care how we name our ad blocker — all they care about is that somebody can view their site without “paying” by downloading their ads. Of course some of them will try to get rid of the “undesirable” users, and if they can do this by blocking a particular browser they will block it (Opera tries hard to avoid being blocked but that’s a totally different point). But if blocking that browser will do them more harm than good these blocking attempts should become very rare.
I can’t imagine any browser that comes with a preconfigured ad blocker that is switched on by default. It is well known that the vast majority of users never configures anything, they use the default settings without being aware of them. But an active ad blocker isn’t something you can simply forget about, it changes the way web pages are displayed and might block something you actually would like to see. In my opinion any built-in ad blocker will have to be switched off by default and only activated by user’s explicit request — maybe in the same way as the popup blocker in Firefox.
And once you give the user the power to decide whether or not he wants to block advertisements blocking browsers become useless. Lets imagine that one half of Firefox users would use an ad blocker while the other half would still view the ads. If an advertiser blocked Firefox he would get rid of the first half (reducing his traffic costs a little) but also of the second half (loosing a significant part of his income). Since traffic is cheap I am pretty sure that this would hurt the advertiser in the long term, even if you ignore the bad publicity he gets by such actions.
The analogy with popup blocking goes further. When popup blocking was first introduced many sites generated their income with annoying popups. Nowadays popup blockers are so widespread that this isn’t a viable way to earn your money any more. The result is that most sites switched to better ways to generate revenue. Some try to trick popup blockers (with limited success). And only a few block users that are using popup blockers, I can’t remember more than one or two in the last few years — and I never went back to them. The same will happen with ads should ad blockers ever be used by a significant percentage of users.
There are other reasons why Adblock (or Adblock Plus) isn’t built into Firefox yet. The most important one is that it is simply too complicated. You have to learn how to create filters and to create a list with good filters to get an ad-free browsing experience. With recent Adblock Plus versions it is enough to add a subscription with two clicks at the first start — but the final goal is just one click to enable Adblock Plus (with all other options reserved for power users).
There are also legal issues of course. I can imagine a number of pretenses on which somebody could sue Mozilla Corporation for giving people a choice. On the other hand, these people are very unlikely to succeed. There is already a number of ad blocking solutions and I haven’t heart of any going out of business because of being sued.
Comment [8]
Commenting is closed for this article.
watcher · 2006-08-07 20:44 · #
Nice topic, here are some comments, how i see this issues:
1) Opera’s “content blocker” or whatever you call it, is crap. I tried it, but it is horrible. Bad address suggestions, you can block only images, etc. The odyssey ended, when I added my Adblock Plus filter. Then it worked quite well. But adding/modifing filters is painful.
2) I do not know if it is possible to compare ad-blockers and popup-blockers. Popups are annoying and you have to close them. Ads are inside the page, they require no user action (except layer-ads, which are the worst of the worst…). And the biggest difference: you can block popups very easy and effective. Blocking ads is difficult and complicated and it relies on filters. And filters are a dangerous, sometimes you block too much; some other time you block one company, but not another (legal issues? bussiness competition?).
One problem, which also Adblock Plus is facing: many people does not understand the difference between filter and program. And the new “introduction” window does not make it better; people are claiming, that Adblock is blocking too much, but they do not see, that they use wrong filters. I have seen peoples, who added all availabe subscriptions, only because they thought it would be the best. But it is the worst; false positives from all filters are summed up, not to mention the redundancy…
3) When Adblock (or similar things) would be included into popular browser, then we soon would face a new dimension of ads, which would be nearly unblockable. CSS-blocking (with or without Adblock) is not easy and needs knowledge. And even this can be bypassed.
Like popups where replaced by layer-ads, advertisers will find ways to circumvent adblockers.
Roundup: I also do not believe, that Firefox would be blocked on many sites, if they would include Adblock (except that they wont get money from Google anymore…). But I think, that they wouldn’t make anyone happy. Site owner would have find new bussiness models, advertisers would have find new methods, general users would have to worry about adblocking and power users would be unhappy, because new ads will circumvent adblock…
toolej · 2007-03-28 22:37 · #
watcher would you care to explain/link how to add my adblock filters?
Thanks :)
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I think you are better off asking questions in the forum rather than expecting an answer from somebody who commented here almost a year ago.
toolej · 2007-03-31 20:07 · #
Hahah, I should probably learn to read :)
TruePath · 2007-06-14 13:55 · #
Why would we WANT it built into the browser? The fewer people who use adblocking the less reason content producers have to try to circumvent it or close up shop. Given that people who really care can go download the extension whats the worry?
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
The fewer people use ad blocking, the less incentive is there for advertisers to use acceptable forms of advertising.
David A · 2007-07-24 17:21 · #
> The fewer people who use adblocking the less reason
> content producers have to try to circumvent it
That is soo egoistic. We must aim at solutions that can benefit everyone. The best I can think of is forbidding ads altogether, by law (like email-spam) or at least require: (1) when you are paid to talk about a product you may only talk provable facts about it, and (2) you may only advertise a product in contexts where it is likely that the viewer is actively looking for a such a product.
Of course, there will still be ads eminating from countries where such laws haven’t been implemented yet, but as globalisation spreads, so will good regulations.
TruePath · 2007-07-28 02:08 · #
First of all if browsers incorporated something like adblockplus it would just eliminate free (ad supported) content. It wouldn’t cause websites to start behaving responsibly.
Why? Because the subscriptions for adblock plus by default block EVERYTHING from the most reasonable text ad to the most annoying javascript modals. So their is no incentive for advertisers to run more reasonable ads, if anything the fact that only a few people will see them gives them the incentive to run the most annoying kind of ads.
I’ve actually tried pretty hard with ad block plus to use it just to filer the annoying ads but it’s damn near impossible. It just isn’t designed to let you easily whitelist certain kinds of advertisements.
Thus the motivation for my comment was the observation that non-discriminating adblocking like one sees in adblockplus is essentially an anti-social choice. The system wouldn’t work if everyone did that. So what’s the point of advocating the inclusion of this in the browser when it neither works as a universal solution nor even as a selfish one?
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Ultimately what I think should be done is to have discriminating ad blocking software installed that blocks the worst and most annoying of the ads but allows the reasonable ones through. This then can be bundled with the browser. However, if the default is to block all ads most users won’t bother to change it and there won’t be any incentive for websites to behave better.
johannes · 2009-02-20 15:55 · #
What about optionally downloading the ads, but not displaying them? This way, webmasters still get their money (if they are paid per view), but advertising companies don’t get space allocated in our subconcious in return. So this would be a reasonable and morally correct thing to do, right? I remember there was such an option in Adblock or Adblock Plus, but now I can’t seem to find it.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
See https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=18397
rike · 2009-04-07 16:20 · #
MVPS Hosts. Windoze/Linux/Whatever.
What ads?