[pothibo]

I run exactly zero extension and used an ad-blocker for maybe 1 month in my whole lifetime.

With that being said, I am genuinely curious how these 2 things are necessary for you to consider a browser. Are there extensions that I don't have that is crazy for me not to have?

[taco_emoji]

I'm genuinely curious how anyone can spend any significant amount of time reading on the web and not use an ad-blocker. Even mostly-benign animated sidebar ads are too distracting for me.

[matwood]

I don't mind static ads, and Click to Flash seems to take care off all the ads that would bother me. The sites I visit are pretty typical of HN, SO, etc... so I'm not necessarily running into bad site designs too often.

[kalleboo]

> Even mostly-benign animated sidebar ads are too distracting for me.

My ad-blocker has been honed for the past 20 years I've been using the web. It's in my head. I just don't see banner-shaped animated objects anymore.

That said, I do block Flash for performance reasons, which also results in getting rid of the worst offenders. The day banners start using CSS animations or god forbid WebGL, I'll probably start blocking them outright.

[0xFFC]

Not going to non-standard site ? I never ever go to site which its developer put ads every where he/she liked.

I have very restricted list of sites which I think are good enough my attention and time.

p.s. and I spend 7 8 hour a day sitting and reading material and documents from net.

p.s-2. And I am okey with standard ads.Site owners has right to make living to, and I think using ads-blocker is selfish act.

[joshuapants]

> Site owners has right to make living to

Site owners have the right to make a living. They do not have a right to waste my bandwidth, damage my hearing, or compromise my security.

> I think using ads-blocker is selfish act

Perhaps, but it's a reaction to the considerably more selfish trend in advertising.

[jamespo]

"damage my hearing" indeed

[0xFFC]

Did you even read whole comment?

[joshuapants]

I did.

[abrowne]

Two words: reading mode.

[bloaf]

You can just modify your HOSTS file and get system-wide ad blocking.

[sliverstorm]

My desperate need for adblockers fluctuates depending on the content I'm primarily browsing. I don't need adblockers for google, stackoverflow, and hackernews. I have gone for months without installing a blocker. But the first day my phone starts being buggy, and I have to start browsing Android press releases and forums, I install an adblocker, because those sites are literally infested with ads. My 60fps-on-skyrim-ultra-settings PC stumbles, lags, and kicks up all the fans to handle rendering some of these web pages because of all the ads.

[joshuapants]

This pretty much mirrors my experience. I'm using Edge on an ancient Thinkpad, and there are many days where I can use it with no issues at all. And then sometimes I click on a link to a news website and my computers grinds to a halt loading all the ads and autoplay videos.

[sp332]

Yeah... mainly an ad blocker. Ads not only compete for attention with the content I want to read on a page, they use my bandwidth and increase my attack surface.

[pothibo]

The attack surface is actually a good point I had not thought of.

[xorcist]

It's not just theoretical. If you want to infect users of well known web sites, buy ads on them. The major ad networks all say that they check for that but in reality they are very lax about what they run.

[joshuapants]

Primarily I use ad-blocking and Greasemonkey. There are, of course, tons of others but I generally haven't found any that fit my usage.

For me, ad-blocking is necessary from a privacy and security standpoint. It's also nice to speed up page loads, decrease memory/CPU usage, and make websites actually usable. I do tend to disable it on sites that I trust.

[idbehold]

Why would I choose a browser that downloads things I don't want over one that provides the ability to not download those things?