‘Ad-light’ Internet Surfing — A Short Easy Guide
Using the computer has been ‘bread and butter’ to me for most of my life. In every sense. As a ‘non-tech’ person some of the online phenomena may seem strange to you as a reader— or just some drawback that cannot be helped….
Online platforms, websites or portals, news sites, video channels, fora or shopping websites are often crowded with advertisements. Especially on video platforms such as Youtube, Vimeo or Dailymotion, to name just a few, ads are sometimes built into your experience — which can make it hard to tell the actual video apart from the surrounding marketing, the ads.
Blocking the Ads
There is help for this: The so-called ‘ad-blockers’.
Ad-blockers are usually little extras you can easily install on all major browsers, Firefox, Chrome or Microsoft Edge, for example. They are called add-ons or extensions.
Note: When you search for the phrase ad-blocker in a search engine, such as Google, you may find all manner of suggestions. Telling these add-ons apart for trustworthy ones is not easy as a beginner.
I encourage you therefore to ‘go to the source’:
Use the add-ons / extensions that are offered in the respective browser’s native ‘store’, they all have them. They also tag those extensions that have been confirmed to be trustworthy. I include links below.
Others might introduce malicious code and do more harm than good.
Links to the stores of the three browsers most commonly used these days:
Firefox Add-ons: Add-on Store
Microsoft Edge (part of Windows since version 10): Extensions
Google Chrome: Chrome Extensions
Search for a suitable one there.
Install an extension by using the respective button of it in such a store.
That’s it!
Below additional information:
Why Advertising?
As many of you know at least from personal experience when shopping or watching TV, ads can be useful — or necessary. They provide additional information on one or the other deal you might not want to miss out on. They also ‘bring food to the table’:
By royalties that are paid to the sites hosting them.
By sales that go up for often quite interesting and sustainable products.
When to Block Ads
As I mentioned and you have noticed, there are ads that are just too much: They advertise frequently on unwanted goods, slow down pages considerably or make it impossible to really read the contents or watch clips for the sheer clutter.
Additionally, there are ads that serve their creators like messengers: They report back your habits, additionally to ‘cookies’ in a browser. I cannot treat ‘cookies’ here but I might soon. You will also find more information online.
In such cases, blocking ads is almost a matter of principle.
When to Surf With Ads
There are sites that specifically ask you to turn off your ad-blocker in order to support them.
One very fine example I like to advocate (no, not affiliated in any way 🙃) is the search engine Ecosia. They actually help plant trees in many countries around the globe. The ads they place not only help with that but are crucial to that endeavour.
For sites such as theirs I turn off my ad-blocker with pleasure.
