Boycott ad-blocking Firefox, urges furious web designer

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 12 Sep 2007 at 11:50

A website designer is calling for a boycott of Firefox in opposition to its ad-blocking extension. Danny Carlton is calling on website owners who rely on advertising to insert a script that prevents Mozilla's web browser from displaying their pages.

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The problem, according to Carlton, is the Ad Block Plus extension, a plug-in that lets Firefox users block advertising and other unwanted content when they view web pages. The extension doesn't allow website owners to prevent it from blocking ads. The result is that "hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort," according to Carlton.

Since Ad Block Plus cannot be blocked in isolation, the only option as far as Carlton is concerned is to block the browser. "Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of website owners and developers," according to the manifesto at Carlton's Why Firefox is Blocked website.

"Numerous websites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore, would be no less than stealing."

Firefox's share of the browser market is expanding rapidly - 400 million copies of the browser have been downloaded. As many as a quarter of those are still in use, but the loss of all that potential traffic does not concern Carlton.

"Demographics have shown that not only are Firefox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking Firefox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers," he claims.

Do you have sympathy for website owners? Or do you regularly use ad-blocking software? Let us know your thought on Comments, below