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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Almost 1500 days ago I made this prediction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300123

"(I can't wait for my quad core computer to grind to a halt with dozens of unblockable canvas advertisements wallpapering every website I go to from now on...sigh, the end is near"

The death of Flash doesn't necessarily mean a better world.

View on HN

Indeed, converting Flash ads into HTML means they can be far more subtly integrated into the page in a way that makes them much harder to separate out and block. With Flash, there was just one thing to block and most of the ads would be gone.

I have a feeling that the trend towards client-side rendering and single-page apps is partly driven by this too; when the JS for displaying ads is part of the JS for the app's core functionality, it gets more difficult to distinguish and remove.

I browse with javascript disabled, at first I thought, most websites would be unusable, but I barely feel the difference on most sites.

Bonus: Pages load way faster.

Most websites (eg. youtube, github, reddit) are unusable without javascript. HN is a rare exception, but even here, the search doesn't work at all without javascript.

Those are sites that most people know about and use frequently (maybe not Github), just like Facebook, but that's a very different thing than "most websites". There are tons of other smaller sites that don't need JS at all.

I have it off by default (whitelist), and most of the sites I come across just as search results don't need it to show the information I'm looking for.

I use scriptblock

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptblock/hcdjkn...

I have youtube and google allowed for javascript.

Reddit browses very fast, ImgUr is kind of a headache because it doesnt load all images, but both are usable.

Bonus point, the extension doesnt work on incognito,so if you want to see certain website, launch it in an incognito window to browse it quickly.

The only major problem with reddit, is that I can not comment... but I can live with that, and when I feel the need to make a comment, I just allow the site temporaly.

perfect.this is very helpful.thank you

Question: not knowing anything about browser plugins, will it be possible to build a "Click to Canvas" plugin, similar to the Click to Flash plugins avialable? It seems like anything that can access the DOM can insert stuff into (override) or outright block elements, right?

I'm sure we'll see such a thing. The problem is that it'll just shift to somewhere else in the browser, and killing off all the codepaths that might be doing something to the non-working canvas might be subtly hard.

It'll stay a game of cat-and-mouse for a long time I'm afraid.

Good points. Thanks. I guess it's inevitable given the free (as in, subscription free) nature of web content. Heck, even paying a subscription to the NYT doesn't opt you out of seeing their ads, unless you take matters into your own hands with something like AdBlock.

https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker

" when action script will easily be converted to html5, then all mobile apps will finally move to the cloud"

that thread is a gold mine.

Here. Have a cookie...?

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