[vmarshall23]

Was anyone else completely blocked from reading that article because all the ads wedged the browser?

[readams]

Flawless with Firefox + uBlock Origin. I find that I am usually immune to whatever complaint that people have about unloadable articles on Hacker News.

[SamBam]

Worked fine with Chrome+uBlock origin, but I did wonder why smithsonianmagazine.com requested permission to send me notifications.

Why would I ever want that from a webpage, except maybe my webmail or calendar?

[sethrin]

I switched from using NoScript to a plugin called uMatrix. It's an improvement in many respects, and I believe it's available for both Firefox and Chrome.

[nerdponx]

The page took about 10 seconds to load fully on an 8-core laptop with 32 GB of RAM, and continued firing off pixel-tracking requests and pings to scorecardresearch.com for about 80 seconds.

All that for a short article which barely introduced the reader to an interesting topic. It was like a factoid crammed into five paragraphs in order to increase ad real estate.

[failrate]

I've started reading everything I can through a proxy that removes everything except for the text and hyperlinks.

[ChrisGranger]

Is this something you've set up yourself, or is there a service you can direct us toward?

[failrate]

I use textise.net

I tried setting up my own, but it was quite a bit harder to manage everyone's broken SSL than I first assumed.

[elliotec]

Try whitelisting the site or disabling it for this session, there aren't any overt or annoying ads from what I can tell.

[crossman]

Yeah. I was interested but ended up closing it in under 5 seconds thanks to the ads.