[textile]

Still on Firefox “extensions”:http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/ .

I have really enjoyed using the “AdBlock”:http://adblock.mozdev.org/ extension, but the effectiveness of it actually got me to think — What is the acceptable use.

AdBlock doesn’t just hide the advertisements, it prevents them from loading. It also makes it very easy to specify what to block with wildcard *. The whole tag for the ads you block (be it images, iframe, or flash) actually got taken out of the HTML served to you. Because of this, the space the ads would otherwise take are also collapsed most of the time. You could literally forget there ever was ads in some website.

But is that modifying the content? Or at least the way the content are meant to be shown. And is that wrong in anyway? (morally?) I guess it is the same as having a TV set that intelligently blank the screen when ads come up (or switch to MTV).

Anyway, I don’t block ads in website I really like. These are usually small and I know they needed the revenue.