After Linda Buquet picked up on my previous post, Webmasters, Could Firefox Be Bad For Your Health? and put it out for discussion on her 5 Star Affiliate Programs blog and the WebProWorld forums, I decided to write a follow-up in an attempt to address some of the issues raised in more detail.

As I mentioned on WebProWorld, Firefox is already used by somewhere between 10 and 14% of all surfers.

That’s a LOT of people.

It’s true that only a percentage of them will make use of plugins at all, but nevertheless, with Google promoting Firefox and paying Adsense publishers for every download, their number can be expected to increase rapidly. This, and the wide range of scripts makes Firefox a potentially bigger problem than Norton’s ad blocking software.

At WebProWorld, southplatte said:

“I need the content I need, when I need it and don’t have time, money or the want to have to scroll past three banner ads in the middle to two side sections and the four adsense ads that separate the paragraphs of how-tos, news or other content I am reading.”

Whilst I don’t condone the over use of ads, that’s largely because it’s against the website’s own best interest, although I agree it’s poor etiquette. There’s a balance to be struck, otherwise you risk visitors feeling you are “overcharging” for your offering, or making them work too hard for it.

However, the rules online should be no different from those of life in general: pay what the seller asks, or move on. So if you do “need the content,” either except the website’s ads as the price to be paid, search elsewhere, or buy a book on the subject.

Whether or not you have money to obtain the information elsewhere isn’t the webmaster’s concern. The website owner owes you nothing more than to behave ethically. Although they may choose to do so, they are not obliged to give you anything at all for free. Why do so many people not get that?

I don’t understand why people have difficulty in accepting that the ads on a website are the price charged for the content provided. Personally I’m grateful for advertising: what could be better than someone willingly underwriting the cost of providing the information you want, just for the opportunity of catching your attention on a related topic?

And just as offline, even if you think the seller is asking too high a price, that doesn’t make it acceptable to steal his or her offerings. When you purposely block advertising, you defraud the webmaster by getting the content without paying the “price” of seeing ads. If the price IS to high, the market will make it clear by obtaining what it wants elsewhere.

The notion that you are doing the webmaster a favour by having their site on your computer is erroneous. As I’ve said before, the surfer CHOOSES to download it from a remote server to their computer to view because it offers something THEY WANT.

Nobody is going to visit a site about my big toe, no matter how much I advertise. Why not? Because it isn’t of value to them. Simple as that.

Webmasters running businesses don’t invite surfers because they seek fame or have some philanthropic urge, they provide a commodity and make money when people who want it search them out. Like cinemas — many may see their ads, but they only invite the qualified: those willing and able to pay the price of admission.

It also needs to be remembered that these Firefox scripts don’t just block ads. Some of them block all images that are the same size as ads. That could be your header graphic, or your subscription sign-up button.

Others enable the downloading of content only meant to be viewed online, or unblock other protected content, or skip redirects to go directly to the destination. One even “prefetches” Google ad links — that means it effectively clicks on all the ads. Think that might put you under the spotlight at Adsense?

Since numerous analogies have been made between website and television advertising, I should mention there are also Greasemonkey scripts to strip ads from streaming video content such as FoxNews and Yahoo.

The analogy to television is inaccurate, but the comparison is interesting.

People tend to have a possessive, territorial attitude with respect to their computers, often making a point of the fact that websites are on THEIR computer, e.g., “It’s MY computer and I have the right to block whatever I want!”

Strangely, people don’t express the same passionate feelings when it comes to television programs on their TV set. Why is that? In respect of rights and ownership a TV and a computer are essentially the same, right? Is it simply the extra degree of end user control with a computer that leads to this irrationality?

Paradoxically, in terms of the receipt of content the two are often viewed as basically the same, yet this is where they are most dissimilar.

Television programming is PUSHED out to your TV, whereas you PULL websites in to your computer.

This makes it doubly strange that people insist on talking in terms of webmasters putting their websites on your computer. They do no such thing, and that is the physical fact.

Another poster, nerdbyte comments:

“I believe the answer is to find other ways to serve ads. Or other ways to refer products. Shouldn’t we be giving people what they want? Pushing against them only seems to make us the losers.”

I think there’s some truth in that. But on the other hand, how less intrusive can you get than adsense text ads? And as for giving people what they want, what about a book review a user searches for and loads into their browser because it’s of value to them, yet feels quite happy using a script that changes the link to deny the writer any recompense for his / her work, but pays them instead?

I think the root cause of the problem is more one of some people feeling they have a right to do and have whatever they want, and that others should be obliged to accept the fact and give it them, with no reciprocation or sense of obligation on their part.

Just because you CAN do something and get away with it doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to do it. I could pilfer from my local shop with ease. But what about the shopkeeper? Is it OK for me to — in effect — take that money out of his pocket?

When it comes to pop-ups, except where scripts are used to auto-spawn multiple windows and in so doing rob users of control over their own web browser (“pop-up hell”); I feel a website has right to use them. It’s part of the package, and if the surfer doesn’t like them, they can go elsewhere. If the website later decides that such a stance is not the most profitable, it can remove them.

However, I also feel there is nothing wrong with the use of pop-up blockers. You may find that strange, even hypocritical. But my reasoning is simple:

Pop-ups that load automatically are not the result of a REQUEST by the surfer. Unlike when a surfer clicks on a link, the content is PUSHED out, not pulled in. The user loses a degree of control over their computer, since the nature of the Internet means the only way a website can push out content is to force the user’s browser to request it. A line is crossed.

Personally, I’ve seldom had problems with pop-ups, and I have the blocker turned off in Firefox, but I guess it depends on the neighbourhoods you surf. Most sites I visit only have a newsletter pop-up, which saves me searching for a subscription form, and is dismissed in a click (or command/alt – w) if I don’t want to sign-up. I actually have certain sections on my site that rely on pop-ups to display content (made long before blockers were even thought of), so those using blockers can’t access it at all.

I’ve been online full-time since ’97, and from what I remember, pop-ups only really became a terrible scourge waiting to trap us at every turn after marketers of pop-up blockers (and scumware) repeatedly told us they were. Now everyone knows it’s a “fact” and must have a blocker. In my experience, apart from a minority of internet marketers, the only real heavy abusers of pop-ups were and remain porn, gambling, coupon and similar websites.

But whatever your position on all this, if we get to the point where most surfers can and do block ads on websites, subvert links to pay themselves or skip redirects, etc., the Internet will shrink dramatically and almost all sites will be pay-to-view.

We all lose.

The way forward would seem to be to remove access to these scripts from mainstream, high-profile sites like those of Mozdev.org and it’s affiliates, which both implies their acceptability and provides the visibility to facilitate mass adoption.

Whilst it’s not possible to stop people from writing such scripts and making them publicly available, it should possible to limit where they are hosted and force them out of sight of the average surfer, by classing such scripts as warez or similar.

I’m sure Mozilla backers like AOL, Google and Sun among others wouldn’t like to see the use of these scripts proliferate any more than I do. It may even be possible to persuade the Firefox developers that the actions of certain types of scripts should be blocked.

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