Web browsers have betrayed us
In the late 90s and early 00s, a casual stroll through the internet could spawn dozens or more pop-over and pop-under ads. Browsers helped us fight against intrusive pop-up ads.
Today, we're in a similar situation to what we faced in the early 00s except this time, our browsers have betrayed our trust.
Simple to complex
In the earlier days of the web, websites were relatively simple. You could scroll and read. You could click on links that took you to other places. By the time I was using a web browser, graphics were displayed on the websites directly. That's an innovation that didn't exist in the earliest browsers. Adding images? An improvement. I suspect that's where ads really kicked off, but we'll get there.
Eventually, people and companies wanted to do more with their browsers than just read, scroll, click, and look at images. Eventually, we'd want to do everything in our browser that we could do in our computers. That's a story for another day but it's not just a bunny trail. Nope, we're stopping at this sight seeing spot for a reason. In the mid-90s, Javascript was invented.
The Pop-up War
HTML isn't a programming language in the same way that Basic, C, Perl, etc. are. It's a markup language, designed to format and display hypertext. Javascript let you run programs in your browser. At first, they were simple. But not too simple to avoid the creation of one of the first great menaces of the internet: the pop-up ad.
You're browsing a site — perhaps several — and suddenly a new window pops up. It's got an ad in it. Extremely annoying. You close it. Maybe it opens another. Soon, you're playing whack-a-mole with pop-ups.
Eventually, the pop-up ad was replaced by something even more nefarious: the pop-under. Unless you're watching your taskbar closely, you don't even realize that a casual stroll through the internet is spawning dozens of ad windows you'll have to deal with once you've stopped your session. It was a menace that users couldn't effectively control themselves. Outside intervention was needed.
That intervention came from the browsers themselves. According to Wikipedia, by 2004, even Internet Explorer had pop-up blocking.
Like the flu, pop-overs and pop-unders haven't really gone away. Nefarious advertisers on the seedier parts of the internet use all sorts of tricks to get around the protection that every browser offers today.
The war is over, though. With browsers as our champions, users won.
All Your Data
Our current battle has been going on for a while. Ads are a vital part of revenue for the web but they're out of control.
The advertisers have fancy new tools to ensure that they can tie everything you do on the internet to a profile they can use to advertise to you. It's a surveillance state that would make Jeremy Bentham blush. But don't worry! The only thing they want is to sell us things! And sell our data to others. And manipulate our vote. But that's the absolute limit, we swear!
What else is there?
As if those things weren't reprehensible enough, they've also made most news sites unusable. Try reading an article while the page moves around underneath you as ads load in and out. Random videos play without any interaction. Trying to select some text to highlight it takes you to new pages.
The most popular browser, Chrome, is owned by one of the largest advertising companies in the world. Chrome doesn't want you running a real, effective ad blocker so they've shut down the interfaces that allow a plug-in to be effective at ad-blocking.
Safari at least gives you an option to use Reader Mode so the page doesn't move around on you while you read. It's also pretty far behind and incompatible with much of the more recent web developments.
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
It's time for browsers to stop betraying their users.
You can have ads. They can't be abusive, though. They can't continue to J. Edgar Hoover our private data and track us. They can't bog down our browsers so much that we have to close them to get our computers' fans to stop blasting hot air continuously. They can't render websites unusable by loading in and out or click hijacking.
Browsers, it's time to implement ad-blocking. Not for ads that respect the privacy of readers and behave themselves in the browser. Pop-up blocking was never about blocking ads. It was about the bad behavior.
Until browsers turn things around, get yourself a browser that will work with an ad blocker. I like Ad Nauseam. Among other things, it lets me see ads on sites that don't use trackers, rewarding sites that are behaving themselves.
Shameless self-promotion
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