353810 - Put on ad-blocking by default

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Annoyance Blocking, enhancement)

Description

[Håkan Waara]

When I was using a vanilla Camino on a friend's computer recently, and surfed, I got both popups, and annoying ads all over the place.

Looking the the prefs, both popup-blocking and ad-blocking were off by default.

Putting on popup-blocking by default is now handled in bug 346132, and I'd like to suggest we do the same with ad-blocking.

Comment 1

[Stuart Morgan]

With popup blocking there's a (now) obvious way to know that a popup is being blocked, whereas ad blocking is completely silent. And because it has false positives there is legitimate content being stripped at some sites.

Removing content from pages without the user knowing it's happening doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Yeah, I don't think we want this.

Comment 3

[philippe (part-time)]

I agree with Stuart here. Ad-blocking is to much of an art, or voodoo, to be turned on by default.
Besides, you run the risk of triggering a massive negative response from powerful players in the business against your product. Look how aggressively some players are working to bypass pop-up blockers.

Comment 4

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Unfortunate, since it's one of our huge distinguishing features from Safari.

Comment 5

[Peter Jaros (:peeja)]

Perhaps we could have a popup-bar-style bar that says something like, "You seem to be browsing a site with ads.  Would you like to block them?" with options to enable ad-blocking, not enable ad-blocking, learn more, and never see the bar again.

Comment 6

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

We just need to promote the @$@# out of it in our docs :(

Comment 7

[Håkan Waara]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Perhaps we could have a popup-bar-style bar that says something like, "You seem
> to be browsing a site with ads.  Would you like to block them?" with options to
> enable ad-blocking, not enable ad-blocking, learn more, and never see the bar
> again.

This sounds like a good idea. We need to trump ad-blocking as one of our main advantages before Safari, like comment 4 points out.

Peter, wanna file a bug?