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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

> Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off — they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads.

Well, for me the whole point of blocking ads is because they are often big flash things that hog cpu and memory. If ABP is no better, then most of the reason is gone. I'd actually like to view ads to support more sites.

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Same here; I stopped using ad blockers a long time ago since click-to-plugin performs the essential function they were providing for me. Perhaps I'll reconsider when "HTML5" ads get more annoying/use more resources.

the point for me is the visual noise, not the memory that ads consume. Actually, normal users are used to the lag, they don't see it as much as we do. You can take a look at consoles that have run games at 30fps for decades and nobody complained.

I don't care about the "visual noise" of normal/banner-type ads - the real problem are those fucking layer ads with confusing icons (the X is the left one, the maximize button the right one), so if you want to read the content, first find out which type of layer ad it is, try to spot the 2x2px hotzone for the close button and THEN read the content.

People install adblockers because too many idiots became too fucking greedy and ruined ads for everyone else!

Exactly, they had their chance, and they abused the privilege, so now we've taken it away.

Tell me about it man; I found that food was getting kind of expensive at some of the restaurants I frequented so now I just dine-and-dash, several times a week. Restaurants as a whole had their chance to charge me for food, they abused it, so I took that right away.

I can’t figure out if you’re making a sarcastic point in rebuttal against orclev, or, because the analogy is so bad, taking the piss out of people who would use that analogy.

Completely agree. I'm usually OK without an adblocker until I wander over to Phoronix.

> the point for me is the visual noise…

Yes! And the cognitive noise. I find it literally impossible to read text if there's some blinking ad nearby. Before Adblock I'd have to put my had up to the screen to block the animation so that I could read the article text in peace.

You used to be able to hit ESC to stop animated gifs from cycle, but they took that functionality out (it was a benign side-effect that 'wasn't in the spec', so it was removed) :/

The one thing I miss from Chrome is the Adblock extension. It has a feature that allows ads on all sites except the ones you explicitly block--a reverse adblock filter, so to speak. I'm ok with seeing ads, but if there's a site I often visit that bothers me (I'm looking at you, weather.com), then I'll block it.

Unfortunately the Firefox version doesn't have this, and neither do the alternative adblock addons I could find.

> Well, for me the whole point of blocking ads is because they are often big flash things that hog cpu and memory.

If you don't want to screw publishers out of compensation for their product but also don't want Flash running arbitrarily on your browser, change your plugin settings to click-to-play (I know Chrome has it but I'm pretty sure Firefox does too). It has the added benefit (for me) of being able to open most video streams in a new tab the way I do with every other article and then consume it at my leisure later.

You do save some memory and CPU usage, but it appears that the cost is usually higher.

You can disable ABP on particular sites. I was going to suggest doing that for sites you frequently visit that don't have ads... but I just did some quick testing and it doesn't seem to change the memory usage at all.

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