I go to places like CNN, or Yahoo, or MSN, and bingo!, the first paragraph and a half of the news story is right there. Good, I start reading. Oh, the ads are still loading. Well, this ad server must be fucked; it’s taking forever. There, it’s done.
I manage to click at just the right time, and get another two sentences of the story before the next stalled out ad server kicks in.
And when all the ads are done? Facebook and Twitter links take their turns.
Then I manage to click down to an entire page of text, and the popup ad takes over.
It seems that Internet sites are encouraging me to block their ads and links. I fully understand where the money comes from for them, and I have no objection in general to those ads and links.
But for Pete’s sake, if I have to sit there and wait for 5 minutes or more until all the extraeneous sites have kicked in their part before I can read your article, your ads and links won’t do you any fucking good, 'cause I’ll be elsewhere.
I am having the same reaction to sites that post articles in the form of a slideshow, or divide up the content into 19 pages that all have a single paragraph of text each. It’s a crappy way to generate more ad views, and it’s annoying as shit. If I load a page that is set up that way, I just close the tab. I’m not rewarding this behavior anymore. I don’t care how interesting the article sounded.
Yep. I don’t mind ads in general, but if a website is designed in such a way that clicking Next for the next slide means the whole goddamned page reloads, then I exit the site and never return.
I agree. For years I’ve heard about AdBlock (here and elsewhere) but never really considered it necessary. It was those websites that have so many ads they freeze my computer that convinced me to install it.
Kinda like how I’m tempted to make illegal copies of DVDs so I can watch them without being forced to sit through all the trailers and disclaimers and anti-piracy warnings.
Try a text browser like Lynx. Sure, you don’t get the eye candy, but it eliminates the vast majority of ads and loads faster than a speeding bullet. It can also leap tall buildings with a single bound. ELinks is pretty snazzy, too.
Why bother with a text browser? Well, here’s what the Elinks website has to say about that:
It’s certainly not a perfect solution, but there have been plenty of times when my connection has slowed to such a crawl that Lynx was a very viable alternative. It’s especially useful if you ony have dialup and and an old computer. Plus, you get that warm, nostalgic feeling for the good old days of 1 Mb memory and 20 Mb hard drives before graphical browsers took over! Give it a try and see if it works for you.
Earlier yesterday I was thinking exactly what the OP posted when I tried a Wall Street Journal link from Google News. It was excruciatingly slow with the scripting and ‘rich content’. I made a mental note not to bother trying to load anything from WSJ again.
Just for fun, though, I just went back and loaded a page from WSJ.
I am running a Lenovo T400 with 2GB RAM Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26 GHz, and IE 7 (which could be the problem).
I am at work and performed a Speedtest which came back with 93Mbps down/48Mbps up.
It took 2 minutes to load this page thanks to the ‘rich content’ (and ads).
The text was visible almost immediately, but I couldn’t scroll due to all the content still loading. It even locked up my ability to switch between tabs in the browser.
Well, they have a lot of content embedded in the site tabs for that page, they must be loading it in the background so that the rest of the experience is seamless…not! It took 90 seconds to switch to the Interactive tab. And even just scrolling lags **after **everything is loaded.
Maybe your speed isn’t what you think or the site was overloaded. It took me less than 5 seconds to completely load (cable, 25Mb down but limited severely by an old router and heavy LAN traffic).
What bugs me are the ads that pop up before the content you wanted. Since I keep my sound off most of the time, I don’t hear them, but if they persist in displaying for more than 5 seconds, I will rarely visit that site again. Forbes is especially bad for this.
I don’t like popup blockers, because the few times I’ve tried them, they blocked some of the stuff I want as well.
Indeed. I realize this is a hijack, but that was one great advantage of VHS over DVDs: they couldn’t make you watch all that junk.
It irritates me that, no matter how long you’ve owned a DVD, and no matter how many times you’ve watched it (a LOT, if you have small kids who like watching the same thing over and over again), you’re always going to have to sit through the anti-piracy warnings one more damned time the next time you pop the DVD into the player.
