All of a sudden, over the last few days, I am getting ads everywhere. I am using chrome and adblock plus. It is turned on.
I tried searching for a thread on this here, and found nothing. I also tried searching in Google to see if some developer had found a way around adblock plus, and I found nothing.
I saw one reddit post from about a month ago that claimed Google itself was behind this, but there wasn’t enough to know whether that was the case or what this means.
Anyone know what’s going on? I don’t think my install is the issue, since I still have the icon next to the address line and it says it is on.
I could live with ads if they behaved. I was actually slow to start using an ad blocker because I think service paid for by ads is a reasonable deal. Then they started splashing across the screen, tried to trick me into clicking in the wrong place, and binding up my browser. That’s when they lost me.
That’s how I felt about it too. I can still tell you exactly when I broke down. I used to read HowStuffWorks every day. When they implemented ads, I was okay with it. When some of those ads were blinking/flashing/animated I just scrolled them off the screen or held my hand over them. When it got to the point that I couldn’t read the articles because there were multiple animated ads on the screen at the same time, that’s when I finally got an adblocker and haven’t looked back.
Like you (OP), I can deal with the ads to a point, I know they need to pay their bills too*. But I cannot read a website with blinking ads or looping gifs or, really, anything moving around (or making noise) on the page. I know it’s me being overly sensitive to that kind of stuff or ADHD or whatever, but the point remains, once it gets that bad, I can’t do it.
One non-ad place that this is a huge problem for me is news sites that insist on popping up a small window with a video playing in it. If I can’t X out of it, or if it pops back up each time you scroll down, I usually end up leaving the page. uBlock is only sometimes able to block those.
*Something I’ve mentioned about adblocking on youtube is that I’d like to see an adblocker that would give you the option to automatically spawn a new window/tab, mute it, and run the same youtube video in that one (or at least the ads). That way the content creator can still make some money, the sponsors still get the ‘views’, but I don’t have to watch it.
I could see something like that being implemented for non-youtube sites as well. Go to, for example, HowItsMade, and see a ‘clean’ website, but let the adblocker pull up a second window without the ads blocked. No ads for me, ad revenue for them. Win win. Even a pihole could probably handle this by retrieving the ads before sending them into the void.
And, while I don’t know if it’s a problem for the OP, the uBo/Firefox combination seems to be the magic bullet for dealing with youtube. I have uBlockOrigin/Firefox/PiHole/SponserBlock and between them, if I hadn’t read about it, I’d be unaware of what’s been going on with the youtube ads lately. It’s my understanding that uBo is doing the heavy lifting here.
It’s not even about the distractions of obtrusive ads. It’s that ad networks are so notoriously porous to hackers and proven as vectors for attack. Yes, sites gotta pay the bills, but also, I gotta protect my computer. And it starts with blocking ads.
A parallel (hidden) window isn’t a bad idea for revenue purposes, but it would need to be strictly ringfenced before I’d be willing to even start thinking about potentially considering the possibility of trusting it.
By the way, looks like FQ answered in one, so if the mods feel his should be in a different forum where people can decry ads and enshittification, that’s fine with me.
A few years ago I installed RealVNC (remote desktop software) on the computers at work. One of the reasons I did that was because the person that sits about 10 feet away from me visits a lot of websites that have a lot of those graphics. Be it flashing ads or looping facebook/instagram/tiktok videos etc. The problem is, when he gets up and walks away, my brain grinds to a halt so I can stare at that. With the remote desktop software, I just pull his computer up and close the window or scroll up/down or mute the volume or whatever I need to do. Saves me the trouble of getting up and walking over there a hundred times a day.