Oh, THAT Doubleclick. The one I've got hardcoded to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. Screw them and their invasive data mining.

I have been using Adblock (and now Adblock Plus) for a few years now. I only have to see ads when I go to work and use Internet Exploder instead of the superior and more secure Firefox.

"Redmond has vigorously fought the deal, claiming that a marriage between two of the most successful internet advertising operations will hamper market competition and destroy online privacy as we know it."

Is this the same Redmond that does everything in its power to hamper market competion in its own market so that it can continue to produce software so ridden with security holes that online privacy for its users is an uphill struggle requiring lots of third party protection? Shurely shome mishtake?

They are probably the thing that pays for a lot of sites. Without them would the WWW be what it is today?

I think that hiding ads hurts the smaller sites and only helps the big sites (because they have a better cash flow). You dont have to click them you know.

But remember sites like El Reg need the ad money to survive. Those reporters dont work for free.

(dead vulture becuase thats what can be the result of ad blocking)

That said, can you please kill those ads with sound, thise rollover ads, and the ones that cover text without opening their own windows? I Promise to click more banner ads if you do.

@ Matthew Bartlett

Advertisers only have themselves to blame. Ad blockers evolved because of aggressive web advertising (pop-ups, pop-unders, flash, animated, etc). Now they are reaping the rewards as their potential customers use ad blockers to block *all* ads.

"....render his day's work ineffective."

Really? To do that you'd have go out and install FurFooks and AdBlock on every PC in the world. Very altruistic of you to offer to spend the time. Tell you what, I'll do me own and save you a little effort.

NoAdHOSTS blocks out most of the honking, beeping, flashing ads no matter what browser you use. I really love it!

You can get it here: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

I'm also an FF/AdBlock user, and I've had some real flamewars with those who whinge about adblockers destroying the internet. When that twat Danny Carlton set up whyfirefoxisblocked.com and started encouraging webmasters to block FF, it took me all of about 2 hours to come up with an absolute counter, allowing me to still use FF on the sites that were blocking it - even the ones that queried the FF API to detect it. I can view any site on the net I want, with my choice of browser, without annoying and distracting animations and sounds ruining my experience; and I left messages or emails on those sites to the effect that I've just "stolen" their content with FF. Fuck off.

Just to add insult to injury, I then created a means of infallibly detecting Firefox even with my own workaround, the User Agent Switcher and Noscript, since my method doesn't require Javascript, the user-agent string, or FF API queries to work - and kept the code to myself while blowing rasperries at the adblocker haters. And I will not reveal my secret trick until I see FF gain majority market share. Then I'll release it into the wild and see how many webmasters are willing to put into practice a scheme that will cut off most of their traffic!

I've specifically enabled Google Ads in my AdBlock because that is a sensible, non-intrusive form of advertising, that I want to encourage. I even click on the ads, even if I have no intention of buying the product, simply to help the webmaster, promote that this form of advertising gets results, and I encourage others to do the same. When the advertising droids realise that in-your-face jiggly-bouncy animated ads don't even get seen anymore they might wake up and realise that less is more, even in advertising. We can only hope.