this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I think as a child I got viruses from one of the ads, you know, the ones would put on the side of the site. We had to call in a guy, to clean parents' computer. I felt really guilty and never touched those ads again.

So Google's and Meta's main business are ads. And recently I felt confused. Do people click on ads? Don't these ads feel phishy to them?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I was there in the late 90s, when hitting the wrong website (or a good one on a bad day) would spawn oodles of pop-ups and pop-unders. And any attempt to close even one of these windows would spawn 10 more. Rinse and repeat until these ads brought not only your browser to a grinding halt, but also your entire operating system, forcing a hard restart of your entire computer.

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

I feel for those websites who rely on ad revenue to exist, but that well was thoroughly poisoned for me long before you (likely) ever existed. I will never permit a browser to exist on any of my systems without an ad-blocker of some kind, and I will configure all of my clients to have the same protections in place.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Every time my parents used the computer, even if it was only for a few minutes, it ended up looking like this

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

Oh wow, I had totally forgotten that it started as phoenix. I only remember that name because the first time I downloaded the browser, the homepage read "Phoenix is now Firebird".