Ad Blockers can go a long way towards fixing two chronic problems we experience while browsing the web:
- Annoying ads, including pop-up and flash video ads, and
- Websites that are sometimes surprisingly slow loading pages.
One of the more reputable ad blocking browser plugins is called: uBlock Origin. You can download it for your Chrome and Firefox web browsers.
How does uBlock Origin do this? When you load a web page in your browser, you are not only loading the HTML and graphical images from the web site your are visiting, like for example: nytimes.com , but you are also loading cookies and advertising images from up to 20 or 30 other web servers. Depending on where in the HTML page the advertising images are requested, your web browser may wait until those images have downloaded before displaying any of the web page.
Another positive that comes with ad blocker software is that the ad images and cookies can add up to quite large downloads, not only slowing you down, but increasing your bandwidth usage.
While there are a number of positives to using ad blocking software, there are some drawback. This biggest being that many websites depend on advertising revenue to pay their employees to produce the content for their websites. I explicitly had told AdBlock to allow ads from website I want to support, and that typically have unobtrusive advertising anyways (ahhm… The Guardian).
The other drawback to ad blockers is that some of them don’t block ads and can be malware masquerading as an ad blocker. uBlock Origin is not malware, and having using it for some time, I highly recommend it, along with the cookie blocker, Privacy Badger. Enjoy!