Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

"I use an ad blocker, because otherwise the web is unusable"

What sites are unusable? Aside from some click-bait destinations like BuzzFeed I've found the web without ad blockers works well enough.

View on HN

Most web sites seem to work well enough. But the real killer is on mobile devices like laptops.

After the recent Firefox update I had to run without Noscript for a while, until it got updated. My laptop battery really took a hit. Loading web comics in 70 tabs or so took battery life estimates down to an hour. With Noscript running and blocking most advertising Javascript the estimate stays up at 3.5 hours.

You didnt get the advertisement for the free replacement battery?

Do you read news at their websites frequently? at least I enable adblock to stop their autoplay videos. It's pretty bad sometimes.

I have (relatively) low-speed, inexpensive Internet service at home. For me, ads can have a pretty big impact on page load times.

I've noticed recently that every Google news links to major publications are 70 percent ads 30 percent content. (That is a rough guess) but my point is, the web has increasingly aggressive and largely pointless ads. I will aggressively block them, or click them to ruin metrics one ad at a time

most local news websites are loaded with 30+ scripts running in the background

Local news are a cesspool in my country. Ads all over, floating layers that slide in when you scroll, covering the main article, requests for automated browser notifications, and the text itself is just 10% of the page and quite hard to find sometimes. It can be a whole page of ads with just one phrase of actual content.

Sometimes the whole thing is a bait and switch - things like "Incredible, find out what happened to this starlet with amazing butt".... after 5-6 phrases that don't say anything about it we find out "... she's crying because her grandma died" (real story). Fucking bait and switch gutter news. But Adblock can't solve that.

I don't think a laptop can be normally used to browse these news sites without Adblock, and sometimes at all.

>What sites are unusable?

Youtube.

I paid for Red a long time ago just to get rid of the ads. I forget they even have ads.

Particularly nice for the app.

Same, but with uBlock instead. I'm shocked every time by how youtube actually looks like when I see someone else using it.

On YouTube in particular, I'd be mostly fine with pre-roll ads if it weren't for those World of Tank ads above the recommended sidebar. Those ads slow my machine down to a crawl some times. No clue why they allow webgl animations in their ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com