While injured I had the chance to do a lot of surfing, especially at some web forums that rely heavily on advertising for revenue. Now, I don't have a problem with advertising on sites. I like to see people setup a site or forum and be financially rewarded for doing so.
However (and you knew that was coming), the Flash-based ads that advertisers are distributing are "teh suck." They take longer than normal to download, delaying access to the content I want. They peg the CPU while they endlessly run, causing my laptop to get uncomfortably hot on my lap, or my desktop's fans to start imitating a windtunnel. Their hyperkenetic material is also distracting—at least initially; now I can visually ignore them, but it took some practice.
In any event, I finally had enough of the user abuse and went searching for a solution. Initially I just removed the Flash plugin from my Library folder, but then Safari popped up a dialog box asking if I wanted to download Flash every time I navigated to a page that had some Flash content. OK, that's a step backwards! After doing some more searching I happened upon some CSS that does a very good job of blocking the obnoxious stuff:
I wish I had bookmarked the site I downloaded it from, but unfortunately I can't find it again! Also, the URL in the header of the file points to a site that's "under development," so that's no help. I'd love to give proper credit if someone can help out.
In Safari, go to Preferences..., then click on the Advanced tab. Set the Style Sheet to stopads.css. Ta da! Some sites will be layed out a little differently with the flash content missing, but so far I haven't found anything that's broken. Best of all, the sites that use Flash for content aren't hopelessly broken—the CSS is clever enough to only block the ads, not the content.
The only thing that keeps this solution from being nirvana is that it doesn't allow the site to send me a normal GIF or JPEG-based ad instead of the Flash one. As I said at the beginning, I'm not against advertising or making money, I'm just against obnoxious ads. This CSS prevents sites from collecting ad revenue. But, I guess there needs to be a penalty for abusing your readers.
Thank you for keeping this file linked. It's great. I've been using it for years and am amazed that yours is the only place left on the Internet that still hosts it.
Please don't ever take it away from a thankful web. :-)
Posted by: Trevor Jacques | 2009.09.20 at 07:09 AM