Let's forget about the utility of not displaying distractions when on the web. Lets forget that when an advert is not displayed, if its not downloaded either then it your page is displayed faster resulting in increased user satisfaction and lower internet usage. Actually that's the funny thing. It is supported and rather well. First the browsers are set up with interfaces to allow add-ons to enhance the rendering of pages. Then, initially, when an advert was blocked it was still downloaded but the good browsers (read firefox and chrome not ie) have improved their internal operation and their interfaces to the add-ons so that higher efficiency is now achieved by not downloading a lump of graphics you're not going to display. I suspect the browsers might never directly add these features (ab+ and ab+ehh) because sponsors will be irritated. By leaving them as add-ons, only those that care will make the effort and improve their viewing experience. The remainder will provide the advertising revenues. I do admit that on sites I like, once in a while when the market is particularly tedious, I turn adblock off and go for it for 10 or 15 minutes clicking as many adverts as I can so that my benefactors don't lose out too much from my enhanced viewing experience.
Much of what is on the internet is all about pigs and whores. For example, go to cnn.com and view the home page. Then click one link to read one story. If you knew how much you spent on the actual text of the story versus everything going on all perpetuated by these pigs and whores, you would (should) shit a brick. The actual text for an average news story is .00000001% of everything you're paying for. You're paying for the bandwidth, the processing and the memory. It might not be on a page by page basis, but the resons you have all of that, and the reason your data connection costs what it costs, is because of all those pigs and whores. Anyone who has it figured out to just read that news story has my respect.
In a lot of office situations where I would either try to block those or don't give users admin rights enough to download extra browsers or add-ins I use a package called Squid (http://www.squid-cache.org/) which caches sites & pages most frequently accessed at the Firewall. So for example, Google's new homepage is cached every morning just after midnight as well as others like Bloomberg.com or Zerohedge. The package (Squid) manages updating the browser cache but then you are able to display and deploy it to your user at gig speeds and the browsing experience is quite simply awesome-fast. And, from an IT perspective your most-used sites are using bandwidth as if only one person is browsing them (not 15 or 50 or 500 users) so it allows you to make a smaller pipe much more effective. It doesn't change much to the end user's machine (CPU usage, memory, etc) but it makes a huge difference on a firm's bandwidth. If you put an LS1 motor in a Mustang you can't exactly take your car in for an under-warranty engine service.
We (users) have always been told that our system will cache webpages so that on subsequent visits we only need to download what has changed. That definitely does not happen and it can be seen when you get on a slow connection. If I visit cnn.com five times per day every day and one day I end up somewhere on a slow connection, I should not have to wait for every frame to load every time but I do. I'll play conspiracy theorist and say it's only there so the government can track you but you don't get accecss to it for our benefit; like the GPS in a cheap cell phone.
Halleluyah - Firefox Version 10 has come out. Appears each and every release is now a MAJOR release !!! They went from 8 to 9 to 9.01 to 10 within 6 months. The CPU issue appears to be licked....at least I can type now. However, with a lot of tabs and windows open, expect CPU to go to 60-80% on occasions.
After updating one of the plug-ins (Java), CPU consumption now has fallen considerably. Also, it may be that long sessions are not good for Firefox...i.e. it needs to be restarted from time-to-time....like daily...even for Version 10.
I wish they would finally fix that memory leak problem...2.5GB memory used with one tab open is no small thing
Really ? I have 7 windows open, each with about 5 tabs on the average. 400 megs used. Seems my Flash plugin has a problem....it shows "crashed" in several tabs.
its strange how coincidentally with this post of mine; something got screwed on the chrome end and i (and other on message boards i have seen) started seeing complete system hangups when using chrome - for apparently browsing googles own sites (someone says it google+ but i am not sure) - requiring a hard boot of the machine. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=49d1d025724db123&hl=en i am now on the firefox bandwagon; works almost perfectly except for some wonkiness with lastpass plugin; actually i like some features in firefox better (able to customize the quick access tabs better); but i miss the easy sync that chrome offered (yes; i do use firefox sync but it not just as easy to use - getting used thought). -gariki