In an interesting development, In response to a popular Firefox extension which blocks advertising, a website owner has decided to block all users of Firefox, comparing the situation to be “no less than stealing“.
“Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing,” wrote Danny Carlton, a Web site designer and author, who runs both sites. JackLewis.net is his personal blog site. “Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software,” he added in a posting on the Why Firefox is Blocked Web site.
The conflict underscores the dilemma facing Web sites that make money through advertising and offer free content to users. Adblock is just one of a variety of free tools, such as the Hosts file, that block the delivery of ads from servers run by ad networks.
The Hosts file can be employed to block ads for browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Browsers can also be tweaked to block ads through modification of a CSS file, which contains rules on how content is displayed in a browser.
Carlton writes that he can’t block only the Firefox users that have the extension installed, so he’s blocking all Firefox users since it’s “the only alternative.” Carlton also posted PHP and JavaScript code that blocks Firefox users from viewing a Web page.
Read the full article here.
This is frankly ridiculous. By the same logic, anyone who reads his sites and doesn’t click on ads is also stealing.
The only people with this extension installed are those who have actively sought it out, downloaded and installed it. These are not the people generating your ad revenue anyway. If you have content on your site they might enjoy let them view it. They might just tell a friend or two, might link to you even. I’m sure there’s a firefox mod out there to fake the browser type too, it’s just a simple HTTP header, so getting around this block is trivial.
If Firefox starts to come with this installed as a default then I’d block it too, but as it is be more concerned with corporate firewalls and filters that remove ads to “reduce their network bandwidth”, or even worse, those that scape sites, strip the ads and replace them with their own.
Final thought, I’m somewhat suspicious that this whole exercise is link bait. He’s getting a lot of publicity about it as I’ve seen it mentioned on a number of blogs. Then he gets the publicity all over again when he decides to lift the block in a few weeks and welcome back Firefox users with open arms. Quite smart really, wish I’d thought of it
Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing.
I SHARE!
so I simply don’t view those sites. Very simple. I don’t view any site that is not firefox friendly anyway. His loss.