> That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket.
Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render.
The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.
I'm willing to concede that I assume a specific view of the nature of ad spots, but you're going to have to reeeeeeaaaaally stretch your argument to claim that this is the reality of the web. For the vast majority of people the browser is the renderer that happens to be customizable, not the arbiter of what is rendered, regardless of the browser's capability to decide.
Regardless, you don't have to accept the online advertising business model, even at a moral level, to acknowledge the shadiness of the other aspects of the practice that I pointed out.
Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render.
The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.