You know the old saying. Someone creates a problem and then sells a remedy. Well, I added ads to my site to experiment with it, and now I have to find ways to block it.
First the good news. On the desktop, both Brave and Edge on Windows seem to block unwanted popups and ads wonderfully. So good on them. Firefox shows ads on the desktop which is disappointing. The other good news is that Brave on Mac seems to block unwanted popups as well. The downside is that Brave on the iPhone/iOS(iPad) shows ads. I will investigate more about this.
Unfortunately on the Mac Safari shows ads and also shows them on iOS (iPhone/iPad). That is disappointing. I don’t use Chrome because Google is removing features from it like ad blocking, so I won’t bother testing that. I am sure it will fail.
I used to use plugins that blocked ads but it turned out that those plugins were selling their data and service to companies so I could no longer trust them. You could also manually turn off settings like Javascript and get a browser that by default shows ads to not show them, but that isn’t worth my time. I’d rather use something and be able to suggest something to others that works out of the box. I don’t want to custom configure something if I have a choice not to. Keeping things off the shelf tends to save time and headaches for companies and people.
Is there a downside to blocking ads? I don’t think so. If you want to see the ads by all means. You do expose yourself to more malware, hacking, and other attempts. It slows you down and wastes your internet bandwidth. To me, it is a waste of time, but more power to you if it turns you on.