<p>Most sites we visit need to make money and they used to typically lease out some ad space like newspapers. Now I find many of these ads are not static pictures, and they drastically slow down the system - I sometimes can’t even scroll down for ten seconds because the ads are chewing up system resources while they flash (Flash?) their wares. I used to have Yahoo as my primary site, but their ads have become much more “aggressive”, like car ads jumping out of the small area and covering much of the viewing area with a video for some 10-15 seconds. Some screens automatically trigger an audio which often times is at a higher volume level than the normal content audio, without a control to just lower or mute it without affecting the whole PC’s audio.</p>
<p>Are there browser settings that can be used to curb the “dynamic” ad activity so they look like static magazine ads without too badly restricting the features of the non-ad areas? Or are there any sites (even possibly with a subscription) that you can recommend that has the variety - news, weather, finances, etc. without a lot of intrusive ads?</p>
<p>I don’t notice ads except at newspaper sites ( & Hulu).
I do use pop-up blockers - some browsers do seem to be slower than others, I use Safari or Firefox.</p>
<p>I like AOL news… But I’m not sure how it’s viewed by the general public. What browser do you use? </p>
<p>I use Google Chrome and rarely have this problem. I don’t know if it’s the browser or not, though. </p>
<p>Any “plugins” or “add ons” that are part of your browser run these ads. But if you remove them, you won’t have ANY access to any videos or other things requiring Shockwave or Flash or whatever. </p>
<p>I THINK this is all accurate… Take everything I say about technology with a grain of salt!</p>
<p>Thank you - I am really old school. Started with Netscape at $29 and when the free IE came, took it and stayed with it. I briefly tried Chrome and Firefox, and didn’t have the patience to go through the options to reset the display font - Chrome, for example seemed to have a much lower resolution jagged look. IE seemed to default to a much more comfortable one. Maybe I should revisit and see if looks better.</p>
<p>For either Firefox or Chrome you can get the AdBlock extension and that gets rid of most of the ads. </p>
<p>Also, check your preferences/settings because your browser might be set to pre-fetch stuff (like links you haven’t yet clicked on) – and that can be part of what is slowing down the page load.</p>
<p>I use Firefox and have a pop-up blocker (Adblock plus) and am relatively tech savvy but I have noticed an increase in these ads recently (I get them on my ipad as well - more there than on Firefox, actually). They seem to be getting very aggressive with them these days on certain websites.</p>
<p>I prefer flashblock to adblock - it replaces Flash ads with an F in a circle - if you want to watch, just click on the F. On my big desktop systems (one is a Nehalem Core i7; 4 cores, 8 threads, 9 GB triple-channel RAM, the other at home is a Core i5, 16 GB RAM, Intel SSD, Dual AMD Video Cards with dual output) multiple pages of flash ads are not a problem for performance. Flash movies at full screen can slow down Firefox because of context-switching issues so I watch movies or TV shows in Chrome on one monitor and do work or reading on the other two monitors. Computer horsepower is so cheap these days.</p>