[edw519]

As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that's a few years off.

Still is. And will always be.

The annoyance of ads will always expand to fill any improvements in throughput achieved by technology.

[davemel37]

If only someone invented a way to block ads from loading :)

Seriously though, why did it take so long for adblocker to be invented?

[e12e]

Long? There's been ad-blocking proxies available for a long time. Eg: http://www.squidguard.org/history.html

I remember setting up some kind of http-proxy with local cache an ad filters in the late 90s, early 00s -- possibly squid with a plugin -- probably on Slackware. Persistent local cache of static resources helped a lot with loading sites (which doesn't really make any sense, considering browsers already had a local cache). Ad-blocking was simple -- just replacing banner.gif-s with a blank gif image or something along those lines. But it worked, and preserved the layout of the page.

[dredmorbius]

Junkbuster, squid, and privoxy have been around for quite a while.