Would there be any legal problem with a browser that didn’t display ads?
I have a couple of ad-killer programs, but they aren’t well integrated into the browser.
If I were able to produce a simple browser that refused to cooperate at all with pop-ups and blinking gifs, etc. would anyone be able to claim I harmed them in some way?
I’m thinking basically an old-style browser, automatically having fewer of those features of annoying commercialism, and just upgrade it to work with the features people really want, like auto-complete and links to related pages, etc.
Well, ads are really just an ordinary old picture and a hyperlink, for the most part. Some get a bit more fancy (“Hit the monkey and win ten dollars!”, for example). But there’s no special marks to identify something as an “ad”, as opposed to just a plain picture/Javascript.
Well I doubt that there is any jurisdiction which compels people to look at ads that you don’t want to, or that compels you to download all information from a particular web page when you only want to look at some of it, nor that would make it illegal to produce a browser that would assist with doing so.
I suppose that a particular site might try to create a contract with each user (perhaps by terms displayed on the first page) by which they agree to provide you with content in return for you downloading and looking at their ads, but good luck on anyone enforcing such a contract in any practical manner. And again, I don’t see what legal remedy the owners of such a site would have against the person who sold the browser that allowed someone to breach such a contract.
At a practical level, the ad-killer software you mention has been out for a while and there has been no legal action against that, and I don’t see why a browser with built in ad-killing properties would be any different.
It would be no more illegal than sticking a post-it note on your moniter to cover where ads are likely to pop up…or browsing with your moniter off…or any number of ways that you can choose not to look at material.
Think of it as fast forwarding through commericals.
You have no obligation to download/read the ads, but they also have no obligation to serve the pages to you either. There is a new sceme brewing from the server side to not show any grpahics at all if the server detects that you are using any sort of ad filter, like “Web Washer” or “Ad Subtract”. It likely will be cracked within a couple days.
My favourite browser konqueror (under linux/KDE) has a setting “disable javascript window.open()’” which at least gets rid of the most annoying ads. I believe the latest release offers the option of not using animates GIFs.
Actually, some people are under contractual obligation to receive ads. (Now, whether they look at them…)
A few years ago several companies were giving away “free” computers. As part of the deal, those users had to sign an agreement that stipulated that they would not uninstall nor bypass the ad software, which took up a good bit of screen space.
For those of us who bought our computers the old-fashioned way, there’s no legal problem with trying to filter out ads.
If you’re lucky enough to have a Macintosh, and even luckier by being able to run OS X, then check out OmniWeb (www.omnigroup.com).
It’s a browser that offers built-in the ability to bypass ads. It filters out domains (such as ads.doubleclick.net) to avoid loading the graphic (for example, if you’re browsing boards.straightdope.com, and the page says to load a graphic from doubleclick.net, then yeah, that’s a good sign it’s an ad). It also filters out graphics that are “common ad sizes.” Of course, if you want to load an image, right-click and load it. Of course, these are user-settable.
The browser also has the options to not-play, play-once, or loop through animated images.
It allows exceptional cookie handling, such as permitting the cookie but later erasing it (to fool stupid sites that DEMAND cookies), all based on specific domains or categories of domains.
Actually, you’re probably not on a Mac (which is too bad), but you really ought to find a Mac user running OS X with OmniWeb, just to check it out and see all of the ad/privacy stuff it has!
And you don’t need OS X to get the same features (though you do need a Mac, at least so far … I think there may be a PC version coming out). The highly-customizable icab browser (http://www.icab.de) has features to filter images by domain, words in the domain (like ‘ad’), or whatever, as well as the cookie features Balthisar mentioned. Except for that right-clicking thing. I’ve leaned as hard as I can on the right side of the mouse and nothing comes up different. [sup]*[/sup]
Now, as far as I know these are simply filtering whatever you set up (for example, you could filter out any domain with the letters ‘gnupto’ in it if you like [sup]**[/sup].
[sub] not to be taken seriously.[/sub]
** [sub]Yes, there is, at least 9. But I didn’t check before hand.[/sub]
It’s a universal web filter, you set your browser to use the Proximatron as a proxy and it runs customizable match-and-replace functions on all incoming and outgoing web traffic. You can set it to filter out features you don’t like such as pop-ups, blinking text, animations, nosy javascript, or spyware. It’s also easy to set up filters to block images from known ad sites. There’s been no lawsuits yet, but some sites have installed smart scripting which refuses to let you use them unless the ads are loading sucessfully.
Err, I meant to say Control-Click, or is it Open-Apple-Click? Golly, get a multi-button mouse!