Very early on in my career, I was working on a greeting-card app in Facebook (back when Facebook apps were a thing).
Got a bug report from one of our own team members that some of her greeting cards didn't show up in the list. The link appeared, but no image. We figured out that the difference was she was running an ad-blocker. We couldn't figure out precisely what rule the blocker was applying, but it seemed to be:
- image
- within some particular size bounds
- with the consecutive letters 'ad' in the URL.
... and we were using hexadecimal encodings to track individual entities in the UI.
We solved the problem by replacing 'a' with 'g' in our hex encoding. And then I had to take a long walk and accept that if I was going to do web development on the public Internet, I'd be sharing the space with intentionally-modified user agents forever, and would have to account for every such modification as we discovered it.
I still won't run my own ad-blocker for this reason.
I still won't run my own ad-blocker for this reason.
I maintained an extension for a public website for a couple years. (It did things like, for example, adding information that was available in the API to the page, for power users.) I eventually gave up with the conclusion that the concept of a browser extension was fundamentally unsound. So I also don’t use an-blocker.
Which is why a decent ad blocker has the option to selectively permit things it thinks are ads. Without blocking I've had multiple occasions of encountering a website that was completely unusable, it would be completely overlaid with ads as soon as they loaded.
Comments
Very early on in my career, I was working on a greeting-card app in Facebook (back when Facebook apps were a thing).
Got a bug report from one of our own team members that some of her greeting cards didn't show up in the list. The link appeared, but no image. We figured out that the difference was she was running an ad-blocker. We couldn't figure out precisely what rule the blocker was applying, but it seemed to be:
- image
- within some particular size bounds
- with the consecutive letters 'ad' in the URL.
... and we were using hexadecimal encodings to track individual entities in the UI.
We solved the problem by replacing 'a' with 'g' in our hex encoding. And then I had to take a long walk and accept that if I was going to do web development on the public Internet, I'd be sharing the space with intentionally-modified user agents forever, and would have to account for every such modification as we discovered it.
I still won't run my own ad-blocker for this reason.
I maintained an extension for a public website for a couple years. (It did things like, for example, adding information that was available in the API to the page, for power users.) I eventually gave up with the conclusion that the concept of a browser extension was fundamentally unsound. So I also don’t use an-blocker.
Which is why a decent ad blocker has the option to selectively permit things it thinks are ads. Without blocking I've had multiple occasions of encountering a website that was completely unusable, it would be completely overlaid with ads as soon as they loaded.