Like many Firefox users I use AdBlock. Today my connection to hulu.com was very slow/constantly stopped to buffer more data on Firefox while connecting via Chrome (no adblocking) had no problem.
Since hulu/youtube/etc. are all ad-supported, I was wondering if has anyone heard of websites dethrottling a connection due to the use of AdBlock.
Thanks.
I’m not sure what you mean by de-throttling, but the last time I went to ifilm, I was told that I had to disconnect adblock blocking software for access, so it seems, at least, to know that I am running it.
It seems as though ifilm has been taken over by the Spike network.
Bob
I don’t think websites can detect Adblock directly (that is, nothing is sent in the HTTP request indicating that particular extension is present).
It’s possible that a website could detect it indirectly using an adserver it controlled (something like set a cookie via http://ads.hulu.com and use a backend process to determine if it has reached your computer). But such a method would be unreliable and I doubt major websites like Hulu would use it.
You can test if the connection problems are caused by Firefox or one of its extensions by running it in safe mode.
“Dethrottling”? Is that anything like dethawing?
Hulu doesn’t throttle back the connection speed because of ad block. It would do no good with a streaming broadcast anyway, because only a small amount of content downloads before it’s played. It’s the bandwidth of you connection or the encoding of the show on Hulu that is the problem.
I don’t know if this answers your question exactly, but here’s what Hulu says about ad blockers.