Firefox, a great new browser that everyone loves. And why shouldn't they its free, stable, secure, light weight, customizable and gives you any feature that you could possibly want with extensions. But these extensions could be responsible fo the death of the internet as we know it. One of the very first extensions that anyone installs is AdBlock. It blocks ads from any and every site you visit. Great isn't it. Not really, because the ads are responsible for keeping the rest of the site free. For example Gmail, it gives you loads of space and loads of features but its free, because of the Google Ads on the side. If everyone started using Firefox [ and AdBlock] then Gmail wouldn't be free. And that goes for most websites, including [probably] Trap17. So, lets take a moment to thanks Microsoft, whose monopoly over the browser market keeps the the free and safe against the threats of open-source creativity.

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Well, not all sites use ads to keep alive some from donations. But I don't really mind the banners it's just the pop-ups (I use IE)

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Many, many sites that provide a service for free (hosting, email, etc) rely on some form of advertising for revenue, or at least to cover the costs of providing the service (other than strictly non-profit organizations, anyway). People obviously aren't going to be all that interested in providing a service to complete strangers that they will never meet out of their own pockets. So yes, blocking all advertising without exception is likely to cause some sites to shut down (I don't use FireFox, so I don't know how this extension works, and whether or not it can block anything other than pop ups).

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ADBlock can block any component of a webpage, based on the rules in the block list. Say if you add *doubleclick* . it will block all objects with that has 'doubleclick' in its url, therfore blocking all Ads served by DoubleClick [a company that serves ads]. You can even block. You can right click unblocked images and iFrames by right-clicking it and selecting AdBlock This.

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First of all, I love that you titled this thread " kill the internet" w/ a name like FearMonger, I read into it just to make sure it wasn't a joke.

Secondly, I think Firefox would have to earn a few hundred million client(probably closer to billion) to make a big enough change to how sites gain money through banners.

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Thanks.



Think Again. Take a Look at Live.com, its a new site belonging to microsoft and when visited through firefox it has a small sentence in red at the top saying "Firefox support coming soon". Don't you miss the days when the red message said " You are using an unsupported browser, please use Internet Explorer 6 or above".

My point is if Microsoft starts making their sites Firefox compatible, its a huge success and a huge step forward for Mozilla.

Let me quote Oscar Wilde who once said, "Pray Microsoft doesn't mess up Internet Explorer 7".

 

 

 

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the title is pretty catchy, yes adblock can certainly block those ads but do you really think internet is only used for ads? In case ads are not available on the internet now, do you think Intel will vanish or shall we say MSN/Yahoo will close?

Yes sometimes ads are really annoying but I just let it run that way, what annoys me most are pop ups.

I'm sorry to disagree with your notion my friend, firefox cannot close/kill the Internet

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I'd just like to mention, that eventhough Internet Explorer doesnt have the extension 'AdBlock', you can still block sites. Though, it would require more manual work to block a site.

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Funnily enough, I was just thinking of this notion today and was wondering what consequences it might have for business on the Net. I'm not sure it'll kill it though cos Internet marketing now is substantially different to what it was five years ago, so I'm sure it'll just evolve into something different.

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I don't agree with you. The whole point of your argument is that the Internet (I think you mean World Wide Web instead of Internet. Don't mix the two up. World Wide Web is just an application of the Internet. Many of the services provided on the Internet, say FTP, are free of ads from the first day. The most used application, P2P, are still free today) must survive with money. This concept is wrong. Consider such programs as Linux and Firefox, they are all nice applications given to the world free of charge. They can still survive, why can't the WWW? As a matter of fact, with the popularity of non-ADSL connections, say FTTB and FTTH and even VDSL, most of the users in East Asia (esp in Japan) can now afford the bandwidth cheaply for home hosted severs. As a result, they are choosing to host the servers at home instead of commercial providers. There are many "home-run" servers in Japan donated freely to internet users and they don't force ads into your page. My friends in Hong Kong are mainly using 10MBit connections and 100MBit connections for the purpose (along with FTP, of course) and it costs only US$12-25 per months. Plus, there is no limit on bandwith.

With FTTB getting popular, I think there will be a time when most webhosts are free and without ads.

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