In New Zealand we have several excellent news websites, but these all suffer from the same problems - each page is loaded with advertising. So that tabbed browser, like IE7 or Firefox, with a few tabs open soon sucks up all the memory and CPU and your PC grinds to a near-halt.
I've got sick enough of this as well as adverts being pushed in my face to set up Firefox with extensions that:
- Block all images unless I choose to load them myself
- Block all Flash movies unless I choose to play them myself
- Block all background audio clips unless I choose to play them myself
- Block all advertising
IE7 users can get an extension that also offers similar options.
So it was no surprise when I installed and configured these extensions that I found I could comfortably open 20 tabs of the New Zealand Herald or Stuff websites on an old Pentium III/1000 with 256MB running XP Pro, without it grinding to a halt.
Removing the advertising and images also removes a major concern about the increasing use of sexually explicit imagery in advertising. We are not talking here about soft porn, we are talking about content that, while considered quite legal, is the equivalent of junk food for the eyes - "junk sex". Yay, I don't have to see this stuff if I don't want to.
Hurrah for the browser enthusiast community for producing these capabilities for these browsers that gives us a choice about what content we want to download, as well as saving bandwidth on restricted (e.g. dialup or traffic limited) connections.
