There’s been a decent amount of hysteria on some of the social news web sites about a new campaign to block Firefox users. The reasoning behind this is because Firefox has a plug-in that allows you block ads. Proponents of this campaign argue that this robs website owners of the opportunity to make money from their site. You can see the campaign’s website here:
http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com
The majority of people who are reacting to this seem to be upset about this. However, after doing a bunch of googling, I was only able to find one site that is participating in this campaign (and it sucks).
Anyway, I figured I’d give my opinion on this issue since I’m sure I’m in the minority. Frankly, I don’t see why so many people are getting upset. If a website is going to block you, just don’t visit that website. There are millions of places to go on the internet, if a handful of sites want their ad revenue and you don’t want to look at ads, just don’t go to those websites. For every site that blocks Firefox, I’m sure an alternative will spring up somewhere.
I kind of like the ad revenue based system though, since it allows a lot of stuff to be free. Most sites I visit have a tasteful display of ads. If I go to a website and they ambush with lots of crap, I just never go there again. I’d hate to see this model replaced with a model where ads are injected into the actual content (movies and TV shows sometimes do this). I wouldn’t put it above sites to do this either. They’re going to make their money one way or another (or disappear).
As a site note, according to my web stats, 37% of the people who visit this website use Firefox. 52% use Internet Explorer, and the rest use a variety of other browsers. I guess that’s indicative of a more web savvy audience.
As idiotic as this campaign is (just read their “myths”, which explains that IE is more secure and patched faster than Firefox for an example), it can be easily blocked by using a user agent switcher.
Firefox is better. I saw the link yesterday too and shook my head. If your livelihood is being circumvented by a technology…innovate. Attacking a technology because people prefer not to be advertised to overtly is wrong-headed. Get funding from advertisers to write an article about them or find some other way such as T-Shirts and DVDs to make money and use the website to augment the popularity of the site.
First Dave – Thanks for the link to that add-on. I’ll have to try it out. I’m not sure I’d trust a site that’s blocking Firefox to talk it up as much of a browser anyway.
Second Dave – I agree that people should try to innovate rather than stomp out (the whole Napster fiasco comes to mind). Most of the alternative money making models that I can think of leave a bad taste in my mouth though. How can you trust a site’s content if they’re being paid to write an article? I don’t think it will come to that though. I think advertisers will become a bit more clever and find ways to get around the ad-blockers. Or maybe they’ll discover ad-blockers don’t cause them to lose money, since only something like 2% of net users regularly click on ads. Whatever happens, blocking a particular web browser isn’t the solution, however, I don’t see much of a reason to get upset over this since doing that is ultimately only going to hurt the sites that implement it.
yeah there is adblock for ie also they have it on the computers at my work (I don’t know why). I have ads on my site and could care less if someone blocks them .