As you may know, the global economic depression has hit the media hard, due in large part to the fact that ad rates are in the toilet. OSNews is in the same boat. Despite the fact that we still have good advertisers, our income from advertising this year will only be a fraction of what it was last year. We probably won't make enough to cover our costs. Other news sites, as they've seen revenue decrease, have responded with more, and more intrusive, advertising. We don' t want to do that. We feel we have a covenant with our readers. If you'll be respectful of our need to run ads, we'll be respectful of your need to read the site without having ads shoved down your throat. Please read on, for more discussion of our ad "covenant," and a plea for help, including a plea to all Adblock users to please unblock OSNews.
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Member since:2007-06-22
I agree, this is one of the first things I noticed as well. Interestingly enough, while the new and improved JavaScript engines help with calculations on loaded pages or with DOM manipulation, blocking unnecessary content still improves page loading and therefore the browsing experience far more noticeably.
As as Mac user another reason I use Adblock Plus is a purely technical one: The Mac version of Firefox has abyssal drawing speed and it's massively impeded by active content like embedded objects (Flash, Quicktime, etc.) but also by many graphics. I've experienced scrolling slow down to a crawl on certain sites where I choose to deactivate ADP. Unfortunately Firefox 3.5 makes the situation worse by introducing pixel scrolling. It's just something to consider as too many Flash ads will simply force me to block them as sites become unusable.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I am regretting the decision right now but it's done. The page also loads 5 times slower....