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paul’s journal

Energy and Advertisments

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It seems like there is this never ending race for more bandwidth. Some of it is necessary to facilitate things like HD video, immersion gaming technology, etc. At the same time so much of it is totally wasted on web ads. Think about all of the news sites you visit. How much of the downloaded data is actually content and how much is simply bandwidth wasted, click the dancing monkey, buy this new software bullshit.

I feel like they are getting so much worse. What starts out generally as a header or footer ad, slowly turns into a third column of ads, then ads between each article and worst of all, ads that float down on top of the content and force you to close them in order to read the actual content.

Its not just bandwidth, it is energy being wasted. Its sick when you consider how much of it is not ever recognized by the user and then how much energy it takes. I would love to see a study of the energy used to produce web ads seen by a user for a year in terms of coal usage, etc. Not only is it bad for the environment and its very bad for your laptops battery life.

Having a browser with a flash blocking plugin helps, but with the move to HTML5 this is going to be increasingly difficult to block.
234 words · edited Apr 2, 2011

💬 11 comments

  1. tinypliny ·

    I hate those ads that keep coming on top of everything else. I use readability to cut down on junk a lot, but sometimes readability does not function well. Stripping down to text is another way to get rid of these annoyances. Some browsers like Opera allow you to script your own CSS and apply it on top of every webpage. It makes all uniqueness and colour go away but I am more productive and able to learn about things and read things much more quickly than without a readability or CSS filter.

  2. tinypliny ·

    You need Chromelite!! :::link:::

  3. paul ·

    Did you know IE9 and Firefox 4 are more efficient than chrome/safari.

  4. tinypliny ·

    Sadly I do. Chrome is a resource-hogger. I prefer Opera 11.01 on Windows platforms and Chrome on linux. Somewhere around firefox's 2.0 release it started taking AGES to startup and I hated it and never got back to it.

  5. metalpeter ·

    Firefox used to be awesome and then at some point not sure why it seems to take forever on everything..........

  6. paul ·

    Firefox 4 is awesome. You should trying it again.

  7. tinypliny ·

    Trying it out now... (you have great persuasive powers ;-)

  8. tinypliny ·

    I just ran it head to head with chrome loading (e:strip). Sorry to say, it took a whole 46 seconds more to load (e:strip). I went a brewed a cup of tea and it was still loading.

    sudo aptitude purge firefox it is.

  9. paul ·

    Firefox 4? I don't believe you. It loads for me in under 1 second.

  10. tinypliny ·

    Yes, FF04. I installed it using this ppa ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
    Its not on my fastest laptop. This laptop has just 512 megs ram and is from 2005 and is running WattOS (with LXDE).

  11. tinypliny ·

    Nevermind. Seems to be some other problem. As soon as I removed firefox, chrome has started dragging as well.

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