A Storm Is Brewing....
Apparantly the web isn't free....
If you've paid attention to your RSS feeds over the last few weeks you've seen the frequent whispers, occassional rants, and sporadic outbursts over the Firefox fueled ad blocking situation. Everyone has an opinion and battle lines are being drawn. Tight knit families of zealots are being torn apart and stronger than steel bonds are bending under the heat. The battle crys are drowning out any semblence of reason.
Do you really deserve to filter the content sent to your browser in a piecemeal format? Do you really have the right to have your ads displayed with your content?
There are so many crucial decisions to be made and as usual the uninformed have gotten loud, the disenchanted have gotten nasty, and the disillusiouned are powering up on the disruption to fight for whatever cause tickles demented fancies. What a mess....
Let's bring order to this chaos...join me and my friends as we hash this out.
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The advantages of blocking Firefox for website owners
From the point of view of site owners, blocking Firefox is a quick and simple way of ensuring that nobody is viewing their sites with an ad blocking plugin such as Adblock Plus installed on their browser. The plugin is only available for Firefox, owing to that browser’s unique open source nature. Internet Explorer remains the world’s most popular browser, and it’s pretty unlikely the Microsoft is going to allow third parties to make and distribute plugins of any type to work with with their software anytime soon.
Blocking the users of any browser is as simple as including a few lines of custom code in the page source of every page on a website. As well as being a fast solution, blocking Firefox users does not alienate a large portion of the web-using community.
For a start, although Firefox has grown in popularity, it remains a minority browser, with only a fraction of web users using it as their default surfing application. This may change, but it is unlikely to change quickly. For the majority of web users, Internet Explorer is the default.
Second, Firefox users have been shown to be worth less to advertising-based websites. Firefox users tend to be sophisticated, highly web-literate individuals who are relatively “ad blind” – they will tend to ignore ads even when they’re right in front of them. By blocking all Firefox users, site owners may be alienating a small and vocal portion of their potential audience, but they are also guaranteeing that nobody running ad blocking plugins such as Adblock Plus is accessing their material.
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