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by rcsorensen 3924 days ago
Yes.

In the final analysis this question is equivalent to "Is it difficult to make a site that can have any piece of it fail to load or be removed at any time?" since website developers have no control over what may or may not make it onto the list of an adblocker.
1 comments
gkop 3924 days ago
JavaScript has had try/catch since forever though?
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tempestn 3924 days ago
Ad blockers don't just block third party things though. Or even necessarily sane things. Our site is a classified ad aggregator. At the time at least, we learned that Adblock Plus would just blithely delete any element with 'ad' as part of its class. (A major section of our results page had the class 'ad block' (ironically) and was blocked.)

Yes, these things can be worked around, but not every site maintainer will bother. (Especially since those adblock users likely don't earn them any direct revenue.)

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nitrogen 3924 days ago
The most egregious site breakage from ad blockers is when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe or Google JS. Some sites have large amounts of content that is only loaded via three levels of third-party-JS indirection. Others will try to fire an event to Google Analytics on every click, but if GA doesn't load, an error is thrown that prevents the click's default action.

I was making a $1000-range purchase on an ecommerce site that was utterly broken by my refusal to be tracked in intimate detail, and their product manager was basically, "eh." So I worked around it by catching the errors for them in the browser inspector. This is the type of breakage that site developers absolutely should be fixing.

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yAnonymous 3924 days ago
>when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe

When sites that require flash break, isn't that a win for the user?

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nitrogen 3924 days ago
Adobe makes more than Flash. They have a number of user tracking, profiling, and A/B testing systems, plus an email delivery and segmentation system. Some or all of those things started as Omniture. Google also has Google Tag Manager, which is a third-party JS for injecting more third-party JS. When half your site's content is loaded by Adobe into "mbox"es, triggered by JS loaded by Google Tag Manager, it's a nightmare for real developers and end users alike even with everything working.
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