
Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers - morisy
http://miranj.in/blog/2015/collateral-damage
======
dragonne
While we're discussing problems with web fonts, let's not forget the other
common ailment: setting body text in a 300-weight font. Plenty of people don't
seem to think to test web fonts on other OSes, as if font rendering were
consistent. But what looks good on a retina Macbook Pro is completely
unreadable on Linux or Windows. That light grey that produces a pleasing level
contrast on a high-end IPS is nearly invisible on a three-year-old corporate-
issue HP laptop.

Really, it's just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding
that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed
to be able to fix a page's text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff
there's always reader mode.

~~~
ryanSrich
It's about the user.

If your user is a developer or designer with a rMBP then you should design
around their wants, needs, use cases, etc. If your user is a middle manager at
a finance company using a Dell from 2009 then you have to design and develop
to their use cases.

Very rarely will these two overlap; only on very very large products. As a
designer I'm not going to forgo using a font or color pallete that my user
finds attractive simply because a random person using antiquated
hardware/software might stumble upon my product.

~~~
scintill76
This is such a bizarre response that I'm wondering if it's sarcastic or
something. To a paraphrase you (but really not much IMO), there are only two
types of people in the world: those who have rMBPs (in the same lighting and
calibration your page was designed in, with the same eyes and brain you have),
and those who don't. (And it doesn't even appear you were using these as two
extremes with a spectrum in between, because you said "Very rarely will these
two overlap.") Somehow, you know exactly which part your audience belongs to
and what they "find attractive", and you don't care if they disagree, or might
have been interested in your content but it's not working because they are on
the opposite of the "rMBP binary" side you chose.

Even if some of this is true, thinking "very rarely will they overlap" seems
so short-sighted.. you're just going to turn away possible users because you
decided your product is niche enough that you can predict exactly what
environment (electronic, biological, and physical) your user is viewing it
through?

I mean, I knew the stereotype that designers are opinionated, but this is a
whole new level...

~~~
ryanSrich
I most certainly didn't say there are only two types of people in the world.
My comment clearly focused on designing around the user. Your user is
different than my user, etc. I simply supplied two common use cases.

It's also a matter of designing around net positivity. If 70% of my users
respond positively to a design then I've done pretty well. 30% in most cases
is a small number. That doesn't mean alienating and ignoring that 30%, but it
also doesn't mean throwing out the approval of the 70%. It's a compromise. (I
didn't think I needed to be so explicit in my first comment).

Larger products, let's say Facebook, even 1% is a million users. So of course
they can't ignore them.

I've obviously struck a sensitive chord here with the HN crowd so I won't go
any further.

~~~
scintill76
The more general version of your argument makes more sense, but I still think
you are taking for granted that you can know your users that well, and how
much "your user is different than my user" really applies. You don't seem to
account for the magnitude of how positively/negatively the user is responding.
If 70% of your users rate it a +2 on a scale of -5 to +5, and 30% rate it -4,
that would seem to meet your scenario, but is that really a good goal, to be
barely tolerable to a "mere" 30%? Maybe I'm being fallacious here since my own
argument is that you won't have data that good, but I mean it as an analogy
for why I disagree with the idea of knowingly pushing a design that won't work
for some users.

Around here at least, it's weird to bake the assumption of a non-large product
into your design philosophy. You don't _want_ to have a large, diverse
userbase? Is your design actually defining who your userbase is, rather than
the other way around? If you want that, we can't stop you, but it seems
strange to us.

------
equil
I hope this entices developers to reconsider the use of private use area (PUA)
[0] based icon fonts for key navigational elements. I see them used time and
again, and a slow connection or spotty CDN can render these sites unusable.
[1]

If you absolutely have to use icon fonts, at least use ligatures instead of a
PUA. That lets you fallback to a whole word if the specific font isn't
present, or if the user relies on assistive technology like a screen reader.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas)

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/GR9Jk2b.png](http://i.imgur.com/GR9Jk2b.png)

~~~
Sephr
There is even an actual Unicode symbol for the left-pointing magnifying glass
([1]) that they are using, yet they use the PUA anyways.

I use the [1] Unicode symbol semantically on my blog with a custom font at
[http://eligrey.com/blog/](http://eligrey.com/blog/)

1\. Edit: Hacker News seems to have stripped the character from my message. I
am referring to U+1F50D left-pointing magnifying glass.

~~~
tombrossman
NB I still get a broken character and not the magnifying glass on your site:
[https://imgur.com/a/3Rb7t](https://imgur.com/a/3Rb7t)

~~~
ChrisGranger
I've made a point of installing a variety of extra Unicode fonts like Symbola,
and I _still_ find sites with characters that don't render properly. I do see
the magnifying glass on the parent comment's site though...

------
ahoge
As a NoScript user, I rarely see web fonts and I prefer it this way. The text
shows up instantaneously and the font will look great and be perfectly
readable.

Most web fonts don't look that nice on Windows. Windows heavily relies on
hinting and doing this properly is a lot of hard mind-numbing work.

Most web fonts also aren't that readable. Sure, your wide/thin/square font
looks very modern and stuff, but it's not as readable as a Verdana or Arial.
When I visit your site, I'm there for the text, not the font.

~~~
RexRollman
I know you are specifically talking about web fonts but let's face it: a lot
of the modern web sucks ass.

I don't want my browser downloading custom fonts, autoplay videos, animated
GIFs, or CSS elements that move around on their own (or refuse to move when I
scroll). I am also not interested having my browser download javascript or
tracking cookies from dozens of third party domains when I visit a site.

~~~
gopowerranger
Your complaint is about design and how the site serves the page, not web
fonts. Knowledgeable developers know how to deliver web fonts quickly and web
fonts that looks good on your system.

Unless you're paying by the byte, what gets downloaded shouldn't concern you
from a well-developed site that doesn't hang on your phone.

Unfortunately, in this copy/paste era, too many sites shoot themselves in the
foot.

~~~
arbitrage
You, or anyone, don't get to tell people what concerns them. If they care
about it, it's a concern.

The cause of the concern should then be addressed, not the person having the
concern.

~~~
gopowerranger
People are "concerned" about a lot of crazy things that shouldn't bother them.

~~~
narrowrail
This is good to have someone that defends these modern practices. My problem
concerns NPR (i.e. npr.org) and their direction for the use of Drupal with a
specific config for the sites for their local affiliates that often requires
Google js for the site to function properly. Practically speaking, this will
not impact most visitors, but most of these people are being pigeonholed
without knowing it for advertising purposes. I have a big problem with this.
It is now affecting non-technical people b/c of the use of (ad)blockers on
iOS.

------
kawera
I love typography and have no issues with the fonts themselves; font servers
are the problem here, making several requests to download not only fonts but
also js scripts. We could easily see Google Fonts as Google Analytics in
desguise, same for Adobe. Encoding fonts directly into stylesheets works
pretty well.

~~~
radicalbyte
Not really, the browser caches these files. They're only loaded once. No
requests for subsequent usages. I don't see how that helps for spying on
visitors?

Google must be doing it to improve performance.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> They're only loaded once. No requests for subsequent usages.

Are you sure? Typically a <script> tag pointing to a cached script will still
trigger a conditional GET.

~~~
radicalbyte
If you include an expiry date with a cache-control header then the server
won't be contacted. I typically use this in combination with a unique suffix
(for changes) for my web applications.

It appears that google are not doing that, they are indeed using these scripts
to track your users.

Take jquery for example:

Response:

    
    
      Remote Address:[2a00:1450:4009:80a::200a]:443
      Request URL:https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js
      Request Method:GET
      Status Code:304 OK
    

Response Headers:

    
    
      age:414824
      alt-svc:quic=":443"; p="1"; ma=604800
      alternate-protocol:443:quic,p=1
      date:Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:17:51 GMT
      expires:Wed, 28 Sep 2016 15:17:51 GMT
      server:GFE/2.0
      status:304

~~~
kawera
If Google isn't doing that, wow, they ARE tracking GF users!

------
dredmorbius
Fuck your web fonts. Seriously, just fuck them to hell.

I've been online since long before the World Wide Web was a thing, and I've
watched the evolution of Web design from TBL's first proposals, through
background wallpapers, animated flames, multicoloured layouts, spacing pixels
and table-based layouts through to the saviours that were supposed to be CSS
and AJAX.

It's all been a terrible mistake.

I'm leaning to a model in which a standard set of templates exist: article
page, index, gallary, catalog, search -- and the client has a set of standard
(or custom) templates to view them with. Client overrides server and author.

Yes, this means putting all but three Web designers in the world out of work.
Couldn't happen soon enough.

A recent discovery of mine was that the combination of uMatrix and Stylish is
fantastic. As the first blocks by default _all_ CSS, fonts, and JS, I'm given
a blank canvas from which I can apply my own preferred stylings (look up
Edward Morbius's motherfucking Web page for a general taste).
[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ)

Before this it was a stable of over 1800 local stylesheets, most quite brief
and/or standard, to fix common gripes.

And it's not just me. A visually disabled friend, totally blind in one eye,
20/60 vision at best _with_ correction in the other, and generally not
particularly computer literate, has endless frustrations with gimmicky
websites with all the usual crap: low contrast, tiny font sizes, hard-to-read
fonts, poor colour choices, content which re-renders multiple times,etc.

I just spent an hour at the local Apple store exploring various accessibility
options. While there are some for Mac and iOS products, they're terribly
insufficient. No way to globally set user font sizes. No way to make "reader
mode" the _default_ for either Safari or Firefox. No alternative to mouse and
icon interactions in far too many cases.

And that's just the OS. The Web as a whole is many times worse.

Readability Mode for the entire Web, with a small header space for branding,
would be a huge improvement over the status quo.

~~~
Too
Twitter bootstrap is in a way one step in this direction. All pages look
kindof the same but since they all build on the same framework it's easy to
customize it over and over again to get some kind of branding applied or to
revert branding clientside for accessibility.

~~~
dredmorbius
Not familiar with that, though microformats generally, somewhat encouraged by
Readability, seem like progress as well.

------
analog31
In my view, fonts are just another case of potential conflicting interests
between content creators and content consumers. I can easily imagine wanting
to override the fonts chosen by content creators, for instance if a vision
impaired person wants to substitute a more readable font (or even let a text-
to-speech program take over).

Content blocking has been around forever. I remember when I got my first real
Internet connection, and the first thing I did was to disable the automatic
downloading of all images. It greatly improved my browsing experience on my
9600 baud dial-up connection.

~~~
mrob
I disable web fonts, because the most legible font is the font you're most
used to reading. Fancy typography is the graphic design version of loudness
war music mastering - something to gain attention and seem attractive in the
short term, but unpleasant in the long term. In both cases there's a tragedy
of the commons situation. People compete to stand out and make things worse
for everybody. Blocking web fonts helps prevent this market failure.

~~~
grey-area
Legibility is important, but it's not the only reason to choose a font. The
form of words (font, colour, size, context) also helps tell you what they
mean.

I agree the reader should be able to override appearance when it suits them,
but there's nothing bad about content creators using form as well as content
to communicate. Feel free to block web fonts, but you should recognise you are
losing something more important than mere decoration by doing so.

~~~
mrob
I agree that the form of the words can be a good way to convey information.
That's why we have bold and italic. There's no need to change the entire font
when you could use those standard variations of a familiar font. You're also
losing something important (familiarity) by allowing designers to change fonts
at will, and I argue that's a greater loss.

------
unabst
Fonts are relatively small compared to media. Full screen top page images are
only viewed once and mostly show nearly immediately on any decent connection,
and are already several times larger than a web font or two used to style
entire web sites. Full screen video is far worse in terms of bandwidth without
user consent. And if you're on a shopping site or any site with photos, a web
font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all.

We must not also forget that web fonts have replaced text graphics. They can
be small, but when used on every header or with multiple states in interfaces,
they added up quickly. Not only are web fonts lighter, they are real text. We
don't want to revert to text graphics.

What we have is the designer on one end, and the user on the other. The
designer wants to decide how the page is served. The user wants to choose how
they consume the page. Some users may add salt and pepper, or remove all the
tomatoes. Giving users power cannot be a bad thing. But do we want features
that automatically change our food no matter where we go? And there may be
some allergic to everything. Maybe they'll turn off JS and not load any
images, and be okay with half the sites being broken. But they will always be
a minority that other's shouldn't be too concerned about. And they will always
do whatever they want.

To know if a web font is ugly requires tasting it first, so at that point,
you've already paid for what you may have tried to save. But considering how
little weight web fonts are and how important they can be as part of what is
being expressed by the composer of a page, ignoring it would be like randomly
removing an ingredient deemed important by the chef.

Why risk those great sites for the one's that suck? Why would we allow the
worst food to dictate all of our meals? Shouldn't we just call out bad web
sites for what they are, instead of crippling our hard earned technology?

Imagine iOS 9 with Arial. Fonts are important.

~~~
kijin
> _Fonts are relatively small compared to media ... a web font is practically
> one photo. It is not that expensive at all._

That may be true in the United States and Western Europe, where a typical font
only needs to encode a hundred glyphs or so. But even Google webfonts begin to
get rather hefty if you include Central European and Cyrillic characters.

Things get even worse with CJK fonts that have (tens of) thousands of glyphs.
I have yet to find a Korean webfont that comes in at less than a megabyte, and
most common webfonts in my country take up several megabytes apiece. It's
really annoying if you're on a metered connection, not to mention s-l-o-w to
load.

> _We don 't want to revert to text graphics._

Of course we don't want to... but things are so bad in CJK-land that I once
wrote a library [1] that automatically generates text graphics given a string
and a font file. It creates a separate image for each word, reuses them where
possible, and automatically adds alt-text for search engines and screen
readers. So at least it's an improvement over old-fashioned text graphics.

[1] [https://github.com/kijin/imgtext](https://github.com/kijin/imgtext)

------
striking
This title doesn't accurately describe the content of the article. The
author's argument is that web designers should be allowing default fonts while
including @font-face fonts, and that Web Fonts had it coming. It also states
that ad blockers are just an implementation of the idea of disabling
crappy/slow web fonts.

And my opinion: Please make your website legible. Serif fonts, or sans-serif
fonts with high weights and large sizes and appropriate widths. Black rather
than light gray. It would be really nice if I didn't have to cURL your website
or hack up its CSS in the Inspector to actually read it. The new design trends
are cute, but there's nothing like actually being able to read a page.

(and if you're using Canvas or something, I've already closed the tab.)

~~~
nitrogen
_Please make your website legible._

I suspect a huge part of the legibility problems a lot of sites see is the
gamma, DPI, and font rendering of the designer's system not matching their
audience. A very thin font with gray-on-gray might look great on a calibrated
5K iMac with Safari, but be completely unreadable on Firefox for Windows on a
standard 1080p screen with bad colors.

~~~
DiabloD3
I am guilty of only color calibrating my screens (mainly for contrast/gamma
reasons, less for straight up color accuracy), and I do this so I get an
accurate look at what contrast actually looks like.

I have 3x Dell U2414H (absolutely fantastic monitors, if you can find any for
sale still (discontinued recently), buy them all up), and display in newest
stable Chrome, newest stable Firefox, MSIE11 in Windows with unadjusted
ClearType settings (only MSIE11 listens to Cleartype settings, and basically
destroys ultra-thin fonts if you adjust Cleartype, so, uh, just leave it
alone, trust me), and then Safari on a retina MBP because Safari both has
different (possibly better, possibly worse, clearly different) font rendering
but also the fact it is on HiDPI increases the difference in how things are
rendered on top of it just being Safari.... and if I don't like what I see in
all four, then I fiddle with it until text is clearly readable.

I'm okay with thin fonts, I actually adore them because they _are_ easier to
read on larger font sized text over thicker text, but _please_ check it on a
standard Windows non-HiDPI machine, especially if you're a Mac fanatic that
loves Safari on a Retina Mac. Just do it.

~~~
gherkin0
> I have 3x Dell U2414H (absolutely fantastic monitors, if you can find any
> for sale still (discontinued recently), buy them all up)

The Dell IPS monitors are great, but I'd recommend the Dell U2415. It has a
now-hard-to-find 16:10 aspect ratio, which gives more vertical pixels.

~~~
DiabloD3
Problem with the U2415 is it doesn't have the amazingly low total latency that
the U2414H has. Including the latency from the panel itself, it is about 4ms
from pixels flowing into the monitor to them flowing out to your eyeballs:
this is better than every single gamer-oriented monitor on the market (which
virtually all of them buffer 1 frame, which at 60hz, is 16.6ms, plus another
2-4ms from the panel itself).

------
Animats
You probably shouldn't be setting your body copy in a downloaded font. That
feature is more suitable for display and heading fonts, which are usually much
larger than fonts used for body copy. People used to put headings in as
images, which is a pain for search engines, screen readers, and everything
else that understands HTML.

------
0xcde4c3db
I don't block fonts to make my web experience faster, I block them to reduce
my browser's attack surface on untrusted sites. Generally speaking, font-
handling code is not exactly notorious for being well-hardened against
attacker-controlled data.

------
MattSteelblade
I agree with the author on his main point, but his statement, "[w]ebsites
should not come with minimum software requirements," only works in a perfect
world. Unless it can be shown in ROI, there is no reason to develop for
anything but a modern browser (I'm looking at you old versions of IE).

~~~
ddebernardy
You might have the ROI question upside down. The overhead of developing for IE
- even older ones - is small if you ignore bells and whistles. There are a few
CSS gotchas to worry about and that's about it. A webpage shouldn't require
megs of JS and assets and what have you to work.

The real question is whether the time you spend on these bells and whistles
contribute a positive ROI.

~~~
tsotha
It might, for a commercial site. Flashy can sell, depending on the business.

------
tcdent
> "...if you’re a user, chances are, you’re quite relieved (or even ecstatic)
> at the ability to block web fonts and experience a faster web."

These days, with increased processing power and standards adoption generally
available, we really have been able to push the weight of websites.

Conversely, battery powered devices and sketchy wideband internet access are
growing rapidly.

Sure, we have the power, but it's becoming apparent that at this scale
effeciency is very important. More users than ever want more content faster
than ever.

Globalized (literally) asset sharing, with technologies like digest references
in script and link tags could make a big difference. Why not even pre-package
really popular stuff (jQuery, Helvetica, etc) with the browser or OS?

~~~
striking
You may have forgotten that Helvetica licenses cost money.
[http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-
family.html?numLic...](http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-
family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1)

Feel free to buy me one, I'm a starving designer :)

Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the
browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content
correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing,
with nothing stored on a local machine.

~~~
radicalbyte
Buy? For the web it's worse - they nickel and dime you based on the number of
visitors to your site.

It's an subscription.

------
Simorgh
As someone fascinated with web design, typography, UI and the like, it may be
worthwhile to point out that design can markedly enhance the rate at which
salient information is digested, the real bitrate, if you like.

The website of an individual, a company, or even a framework like django rely
on more than the digestion of facts, the factual-bitrate if you like. Perhaps
not entirely scientific, but things like 'aura', 'emotion', 'atmosphere' and
'feel' can stimulate in a way in which a generic layout cannot. Design creates
memorable impressions and literally colours our intuition and usage, allowing
us to emote with others.

Although I acknowledge that the brain is not well understood, it seems
plausible that some minds rely more on design (used in a very loose way here)
than on a more scientific analytical mindset to interpret content and what is
going on.

Note I did not use the word rational to refer to the latter mindset.

That's because humans are not particular rational. Trying to systematise the
internet and remove all 'colour' would take away the beauty and the poetry of
what the internet allows us to do.

------
narsil
As a user, I hope this pushes designers to consider the aesthetics of a page
rendered in a font supported by the browser. Unlike JavaScript, a web page
rarely _needs_ a custom font to function, so designers must assume users would
block custom fonts if preferable.

~~~
andyfleming
Yeah, but in reality, designers may just turn back to static images to
maintain a consistent appearance. That would force a step backwards.

~~~
dragonne
Hopefully we can find a more pleasing medium. For example, if designers used
web fonts with metrics that match common built-ins the FOUT could be made much
less jarring. (Yes, ligatures and such make that difficult in the general
case, but it surely could be good enough for headlines.)

------
conductr
Seems like use of fonts isn't the issue, it's the fact they have to be served.
Why can't browsers embed more fonts?

~~~
striking
Fonts cost money to license. [http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-
family.html?numLic...](http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-
family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1)

Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the
browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content
correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing,
with nothing stored on a local machine.

~~~
mapt
It may not be in the spirit of the web, but the current state of things is a
failure. Less of a failure than 10 years ago, but still a failure.

Packaging the most popular / representative, say, 256 free & open fonts
together and distributing them with Firefox and Chrome would be a _useful
thing_ for designers of everything on the web other than fonts.

~~~
vacri
A gzipped truetype font is in the order of 100k, though plenty are bigger. 256
of these is ~25MB. Chrome and Firefox are only 45MB to begin with.

------
kmfrk
As old as the web can feel at time, we are so blessed to have Georgia as one
of the standard fonts. It is such a good serif font, which is also why I think
a lot of the typography out there is more ornamental than necessary.

------
benjiweber
I have blacklisted google webfonts with hosts-file entry as many websites use
fonts from there that are terrible.

For instance open sans seems to be used more and more. Here's what it's like
without antialiasing (top), vs Arial (bottom)
[http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png](http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png)

Antialiasing hides some of the terribleness but it is still much harder to
read than alternatives.

------
andyfleming
There are some interesting issues at play here. There is obviously some desire
to have levels of standardized-form content that can be consumed in the way
that the user desires.

However, I disagree with a closed internet. Websites, like brick and mortar
businesses, should be able to do what they want. They are responsible for the
user's experience and should be able to craft it as they see fit. A browser
(or extensions) should not be forcing an agenda for how consumers may or may
not want to experience the internet. (Ads in partciular, are a unique part of
the discussion).

I appreciate websites like medium, reddit, facebook, pinterest, and others
that standardized content formats for users to experience in a consitent way.

The "death of RSS" is related here too. It's a complex issue. With RSS the
user has significantly more control, but the problem is that you lose context
and it can often become hard to browse large amounts of content.

~~~
binarycrusader
Sorry, but the idea that the client (browser) doesn't get to choose the
experience is fundamentally incompatible with the architecture of the web. I
don't see how you can call that a "closed" internet; quite the opposite.

From the very beginning, almost every standard related to the web has made it
very clear that ultimately clients get to choose what to display, what to
retrieve, and how to display it.

Yes, that freedom comes with a price, but it's a price worth paying. For users
that are visually impaired, it's particularly important to be able to override
the _suggestions_ of the content being displayed.

I don't see how there's an "agenda" involved in what any web browsers are
doing today. The end user is the one choosing to use the client, choosing to
use the content blocker, etc.

If Apple or Google made the choice to start blocking content using the browser
itself (on their own), you might have a point, but that hasn't happened (yet).

~~~
andyfleming
Absolutely, both the user and the website/webmaster should be able to freely
make their own decisions.

My issue is with the idea of grouping web font blocking with ad blocking. A
user should choose separately if they'd like to block:

• Ads

• Tracking scripts

• Creative assets that may slow web performance (like web fonts)

• Other non-essential, non-creative scripts that may slow web performance

~~~
binarycrusader
Agreed; I'd also argue that web fonts shouldn't be blocked by default unless
retrieval of them presents a privacy or tracking concern (unique source url,
etc.).

In short, I don't disagree with what you've said at all. However, content
providers must keep in mind that ultimately, they don't control how their
content is presented or what part of it is displayed.

------
alexweber
Site was down when I tried to load it today. Here's a mirror via Google cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:miranj...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:miranj.in%2Fblog%2F2015%2Fcollateral-
damage)

------
MichaelGG
What blockers/browsers should do is just _tell_ scripts that they finished
loading. Then sites would continue to work just fine. This kind of technique
is gonna be needed to continue ad blocking once a lot of pages start trying to
detect blockers and not display content.

~~~
zodiakzz
That would start a needless arms race, there are a million ways to detect if
you're using an ad blocker.

~~~
MichaelGG
Ultimately winnable by the end user. It's DRM all over again. Worst case: An
image recog system identifies and blanks out areas that are showing ads. (Or
hell, a robot arm puts pieces of paper over the screen.)

May as well start the arms race when we know who will finish it.

~~~
ansgri
re: a robot arm:

websites will simply require to connect to a webcam showing you browsing the
site to allow viewing.

We'd better devise a way to painlessly charge users ¢0.1 per view.

~~~
MichaelGG
True. I suppose they could also serve up an ad-captcha before serving the
content.

------
rswail
and this blog entry is a prime example, choosing a font that was small and
faint against a bright background, making me click on my DFT firefox extension
to override it.

Worse is that there was absolutely no requirement for them to choose a small
serif font for any particular web design reason.

~~~
EdwardDiego
Small and faint? Looks fine to me?
[http://imgur.com/g6Ue5Fj](http://imgur.com/g6Ue5Fj)

~~~
pmontra
Your image is 404.

The text on the site is not black but it's 90% OK on my tablet (8" and about
2500x1600 px). Black text would probably be better. There is also a lot of
useless ( _) margin on the left but I can punch to zoom and make the text fill
all the screen. No issues with font color at that size.

(_) Useless because I want to read the text comfortably on the tablet. The
screen of my computer is larger and I probably won't mind that margin there.

------
steanne
this is one part of why i love my rss reader.

