Do you think that there will ever be widespread/mainstream client-side control of the web like this? Where it was the norm that, say, 90% of web users blocked ads and analytics? Would it be good or bad?
As a web user, I welcome this extension. It's my browser, and I should be able to control its IO.
As a web developer... well, I've never been a fan of advertising-based revenue, but I'd like accurate analytics.
Until a trustworthy self-hosted analytics script that's fast and doesn't consume too many resources appears, my browser/OS and other info will remain underrepresented in websites' analytics dashboards.
For me, the toughest thing is to figure out which cloudfront subdomains to allow.
NoScript's surrogate scripts are the user's side of this arms race. I think it should be clear that the advertisers can only have as much success as any other DRM provider that relies solely on obfuscation while still trusting the client. Surrogate scripts can be updated more quickly than the multitude of web sites that need to verify that an ad was shown.
* AdBlock Plus * NoScript * WOT * Ghostery * Better Privacy * DoNotTrackMe
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/privacy-...
Now for the hypothetical question as to whether it would be "bad or good", I don't understand: how could it be bad if 90% of people make the choice of blocking unwanted content/connection?
"Google derives most of its value from advertising where it competes primarily with Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook. . According to our estimates, standard PC search ads account for over 30% of Google’s overall value and 60% of its revenues. However, the recent trend in earnings indicates that the growth in online PC ads revenues is slowing down. Additionally, the company’s market share of the U.S. search marketplace has been stagnant at 67%, according to latest data by comScore."
Primarily ad-funded free websites would make losses, or go paid. Us, the customers, pay for not wanting to see ads. Of course, this is just my opinion on what might happen.
If ever blockers are used by a majority of people, content and ad providers will have to deal (rather than whine) with this reality, it's called "market forces".
Now that's just regarding ads, but of course there is another consideration for blockers: privacy. It's creepy to stumble onto a marketing firm bragging to their prospective clients that they will be able to "see absolutely everything your visitors do on your webpage ... See their every mouse move, click and keystroke".
I have no idea how successful that has been for them with regards to increasing revenue -- I do know that I've pretty much stopped reading them (but a large part of that is that their content is hastily written crap, not offering much of any value over other, better, international sites). Had at least some of their reviews and articles been worth reading, I might have considered paying for a subscription.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is from that, though. Don't try to sell crap?
Me, I'd be fine with sites that blocked users that don't display ads, like me. Then I could make the choice whether it's important enough to me that I would put up with them. It's unlikely I would but at least at that point we're on a level playing field.
I'd actually support some sort of request header that (unlike the utterly useless DoNotTrack) says something like WillNotDisplayAdvertising.