I'm a bit baffled that automated ad blocker tests exist in the first place. Historically the main difficulty in writing an ad blocker are the rules. How are you going to accurately test these rules by ... testing if they match your imagined rules.
I guess there is always an opportunity to peddle a useless metric. If you actually wanted to do this right the obvious way would be manual review: pick X websites, visit them with each ad blocker, deduct points for visible ads and lost functionality. Repeat for each ad blocker, then rank them by score. That would also give you a nice score whether ad blockers or the advertising industry is currently "winning" the ad war
Ad blockers are just the embodiment of the internet’s social convention: send whatever bits you want, and I’ll render them however I want. If somebody wants to sent me ads, I prefer not to render them. But they don’t burn my eyeballs out.
They are more like a picket fence, than a fortification with barbed wire and all that.
If a site is really persistent about circumventing my adblocker, they are basically hostile to me and I should just leave.
>They are more like a picket fence, than a fortification with barbed wire and all that.
I disagree. I consider an adblocker (Ublock specifically plus Cookie AutoDelete) like a condom for my web browser. The name adblocker is really a misnomer, since it blocks much more nefarious things like tracking and fingerprinting. The name comes from a time when the internet was much less hostile and adversarial towards its users. Additionally, browsing the internet in the EU is a miserable experience because of unrelenting and useless cookie popups, made worse when one manages cookies with CAD.
If all I had to deal with was just ads, at a reasonable volume, I wouldn't care so much.
I run ublock origin and noscript. So, my way of looking at it might be very influenced by the software I use.
But I think of these as pretty different use-cases. It is better not to run JavaScript at all from malicious sites, I think I put most of your “condom” use-case in there. Ublock is just there to make the site pretty.
Yes, I agreed. To be clear I’m not doing the silly thing of threatening to leave a site I’m not going to pay for. I’m describing the result that makes everybody happy.
There's a few sites I visit that show first party ads. They are all related to the normal audience of the site itself, rather than based on my history. I see this as a fair exchange.
> send whatever bits you want, and I’ll render them however I want
> If a site is really persistent about circumventing my adblocker, they are basically hostile to me and I should just leave
You need to pick one of these.
You either are ok when them sending you any bits they want and you render whatever you want, or not. These bits might influence your adblocker - you're free to overcome that and render it the way you want. Or not, if you're not willing to/ not capable to do that.
I think the article reaches the right conclusion in this matter: This kind of thing is a test of an interchangeable list of rulesets instead of a test of the blocker using them.
I guess there is always an opportunity to peddle a useless metric. If you actually wanted to do this right the obvious way would be manual review: pick X websites, visit them with each ad blocker, deduct points for visible ads and lost functionality. Repeat for each ad blocker, then rank them by score. That would also give you a nice score whether ad blockers or the advertising industry is currently "winning" the ad war