Adblock Plus Causes Commotion

A new edition to the Firefox Internet browser may soon be available and is causing quite the commotion. Adblock Plus, a free tool used to block all ads from websites, leaving nothing but white space is making its way slowly through the masses. The tool takes about one to two minutes to download and then wipes the pages clean of commercial communication. The tool is only used for the open-source Firefox right now, not having any effect on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The developer of Adblock Plus [Wladimir Palant] said, “The program isn’t popular enough yet. Attacking it would be a waste of time for these companies.” He estimated 2.5 million people use Adblock Plus. Palant describes himself not as an ideological opponent of online advertising though. In his blog, Palant answered questions to create an Adblock for the Internet Explorer posting, “I already answered that question several times but recently a few people asked me again to create an Adblock Plus version for Internet Explorer, so I thought it would be worth answering in detail in my blog. The fact is this is not likely to happen for various reasons.”

Several experts say the first thing for companies and sites to do is technological not legal and according to Mr Palant none of the major companies have contacted him. He also stated that, “One way to make sure the ads aren’t blocked is to add value to the ads and make sure viewers don’t want to delete them.” He wrote this in his blog. “Don’t forget about the users. Use ads in a way that doesn’t degrade their experience. In Adblock Plus there is a way to set up a filter for certain ads.”

Other criticisms include copyright troubles similar to Tivoli and so on. Yet at this point Adblock Plus hasn’t had any legal troubles. One blogger in particular, Danny Carlton, won’t let a viewer using Firefox to view his blog. Instead, he redirects them to another page. His stance is one of many to try to fight Adblock yet even his actions receive criticism. Let’s take a look at this page created to taunt Firefox users. The site tells of the history and why Firefox users should be blocked from all Net sites.

Microsoft is the only major company to release a statement regarding Adblock, but they simply encourage users to create ad-ons.

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