I'd never run (and I'm sure a lot of people here don't either) a desktop browser without some sort of ad blocking going on
I'd actually be interested to see an HN poll on this. I do not run an ad blocker and frankly I find most complaints about ads online to be totally overblown. Years ago there was a hellish amount of pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders, but these days I really don't have many problems, and I'm happy to support the sites I use.
I used to, but got tired of it. ABP just seems to make everything slower. Back in the day, an ad blocking hosts file worked like magic. No memory leaks from the browser or other problems. Ad loads failed at name resolution time and failed very quickly.
Also, to be fair to internet marketers, ads are much better than they used to be. The old 'punch the monkey style' ads are long gone outside of.. how do you say, questionable sites. Auto-playing videos are rare. Once in a blue moon I actually click on ads that are targeted to me. The system sometimes works.
Railing against ads just seems like a poseur-ish thing nowadays. I also feel especially bad blocking ads from sites I visit regularly. Its a dick-ish thing to do. It just seems better to keep open a dialogue on what we consider acceptable ads and what we consider unacceptable ads. Or help the site owner understand that they're better off with targeted ads or selling their ad space themselves, than joining some shady affiliate group with generic "This school teacher is making $900 a day" crap or, heaven forbid, video auto-play ads (which are pretty rare nowadays outside of news sites/youtube where the content is video but you're forced to sit through 35 seconds of ad before you can see it.)
A lot of annoying content isn't ads at all, its dhtml/css 'pop ups' asking you for your email address or facebook login or survey or whatever. ABP doesn't usually stop those either.
Loudly proclaiming you must use ABP is almost like saying, "Well, I visit tons of shady porn and torrent sites, where its more or less required." The non-shady web just seems like a better place than during the early 2000s when Flash ads ruled. YMMV of course.
It's not just ads though - as someone who runs NoScript in Firefox the number of 3rd party ad targeting and "audience enhancement" stuff I see that gets pulled in to most sites is crazy - some sites pull in stuff from like 20 different providers. It's this ad retargetting that follows you around the web that personally bothers me - I know not everyone cares (and some even welcome it) but seeing how much tracking is going on makes me really glad I'm running NoScript and ad blockers.
It's kind of like when you stop watching TV for years — encountering a TV commercial is a horribly memorable and distracting event. You also develop a hypersensitivity to ads on the web after blocking them for a long time.
If you are used to them and can block them out you're probably mentally doing the same job as an ad blocker.
It would be better to support the sites you use by paying for them without an advertising middleman[1].
If only we all focused on solving this direct payment problem[2] instead of actually actively working to further embed the advertising industry[3].
Sadly my comments along these lines always get downvoted because, as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
[3] "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
I'm in the same boat, I don't run an ad blocker, but I do block flash and java-script from running until I enable them per-website. I personally don't have a problem with ad's, but my home laptop is pretty slow and ad's on most websites eat a ridiculous amount of resources.
I don't use an ad blocker but I also don't have Flash installed. That last step was transformative a few years back when Flash was even slower and unreliable on OS X but it's still a surprising win even now.
The main difference I see now is that people with ad blockers talk about frequenting sites which have tons of ads, which doesn't send a message to the owner and probably actually exacerbates the problem since they'll toss bigger, more intrusive ads in ads the clicks-per-visitor rate drops. If I hit a site like that, I'll just leave and go somewhere else which respects its visitors more, particularly if they're savvy enough to follow the lead of sites like ArsTechnica which allow subscribers to disable ads.
I can't read text on screens that have animations on them.
Well, I can, but it requires a noticeably higher level of focus not to be distracted by movement in my peripheral vision - noticeable enough to be unpleasant.
I just tried disabled my adblocker temporarily; Ars Technica itself has exactly the kind of animated ads that I can't stand.
It's not just ads, though. It's all animations. I use image.animation_mode=once in Firefox to disable looping gif animations, use Flashblock, and generally disable anything that auto-starts whenever possible. The only thing I want animated on my screen is the cursor.
Going to android forums on an android device (with no ad blocking) made me really appreciate how much ad blocking does for me. On those forums I'd see an add fixed at the bottom, a floating ad at the start, and ads in between posts. Even Ars Technica shows me full page click-through ads every time I visit. It's awful!
For whatever it's worth, I'm about the same. I never bothered with any of the blockers, and just browse sites normally. I don't pay much attention to the ads. I call it my wetware ad blocker. Some sites can be really awful, but I just don't visit those anymore.
Some of my browsing habits lead me to sites where there are literally popups upon popups. Sure, maybe I could only enable it for those sights, but that takes time - and I'm lazy.
So whilst I see where you're coming from, you can't just rule out annoying ads all together.
The progress marches on. The major annoyance are "talking" ads which disabling flash used to neuter. Nowadays, I see more and more autoplayed video ads served as a fallback. Almost at the point where need to do something to preserve some sanity. I like the "support the sites" mantra, but those publishers need to try to choose reputable ads networks and enforce the policy of cutting clearly obnoxious ones
It's also worth noting that ABP is an absolute pig, on either Firefox or Chrome. I found that memory consumption and machine churn significantly dropped when I simply removed it and lived with ads. I've done no empirical measures on this, but am convinced that the cure is worse than the disease.
Try uBlock, it is much faster than ABP and uses way less resources. Or do it the good old fashion way and use a HOSTS file with the added advantage that ads will be blocked on your entire computer and not just your browser.
I was actually completely unaware that Youtube had ads for a long, long time. I'm not sure I could move to a solution where I would be forced to watch them.
True, which is why I tried to be agnostic on the actual means of adblocking in my op. Regardless, it requires a level of openness on Apple's part that I'm being slightly delusional about wanting.
I'm using HTTP Switchboard which uses much less memory has offers a lot more control over what to block and what to allow through, but it does take a bit more configuration than ABP.
I'm getting really close to switching back to AdBlock for Safari (the one based on an old fork). It did a decent job my machines feel much older with ABP. I can see rendering delays on large pages.
I'd actually be interested to see an HN poll on this. I do not run an ad blocker and frankly I find most complaints about ads online to be totally overblown. Years ago there was a hellish amount of pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders, but these days I really don't have many problems, and I'm happy to support the sites I use.