Setting a new standard?

I’ve been using advertising blockers on my computers for a while now.  With the slow internet connection I have, it makes all the difference in the world.  After a while, some advertising just becomes obnoxious, so intrusive and then they I just became numb to them.  Except for wondering why it takes forever for some web pages to load.  I do feel badly at times because it’s the only source of income for some.

Hopefully, there’s ultimately a message in there for advertisers – make yourself less annoying and maybe we’ll welcome you back.

There’s been a great deal written about these things and ways to avoid them recently.  In the not so distant past, you’d read about the virtues of the various advertising blocking extensions.  What do they do?  How do they know an advertisement from a story or an image?  How can you allow some advertising and disallow others?

If you use blocking, there are some websites that have retaliated and will not allow you access any more.  Or, there are others that will request that you white list them since advertising is their only source of funding.

Then, there are the web browsers abilities.  Just about every browser supports add-ons or extensions that allow you to choose your favourite ad blocker utility and install it.  Like anything, there’s a hit on your browsing performance with every one you install and there are plenty of reviews available for reading to help you make a choice.

Now, there’s the browser themselves.

The first to hit my radar was the Brave Browser.  It claims to be built with safety in mind and does the trick when it comes to blocking advertising.  There appears to be a long term plan for working with advertisers.

The second to catch my interest is the Opera Browser.  On my computers, where I have a bunch of browsers installed, it’s the Chromium based browser that I use the most.  Just recently, it added ad blocking to its release channels.  It’s just a toggle to turn on in the preferences.  It comes with some exceptions to the advertising blocking that you can adjust and also white list your own, if desired.

This morning, I used Opera and turned blocking on and off to see the results on one of the news sites I visit regularly.

I reloaded and ran it again and this time it found 20.  Details about the blocking are available by clicking on the little shield.

Clicking through to the Speed test gives you an indicator of how long it loads with and without the ads.  In this case, Opera claims to load the one page 60% faster.  Of course, your mileage may vary and the results are from the browser.  But, I’d rather have that 60% available to do something else.

Opera also runs on mobile with the ad blocking feature.  

It also uses other data saving technologies (with a warning) to keep bandwidth and speed hits to a minimum.

Now that there are two web browsers on the market with this feature built in, will it be long before others follow?  If they do, and you have to believe that the big guys are watching the user numbers from Brave and Opera, will it be long before it’s implemented more universally?  It will be tough with Chrome since Google relies on advertising but you might see some selective blocking.

And what of the advertisers and content providers?  You know that they have been looking at this issue for a long time for their marketing plans.  Is there a way that they can still incorporate advertising that’s tolerable to the browsing public instead of some of the big, noise, bandwidth consuming things that started this whole issue to begin with?  I’ve got to believe that they are looking at this, investigating ways.

Ultimately, we should all get a faster and safer web browsing experience.

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