My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?
Taking out a full-page newspaper ad is an attention-grabber. Taking out a full-page pop-up is merely an annoyance. Why does this perception exist? Why isn't digital space regarded on-par with paper space?
Because of this, digital ads sell for much, much less than paper ads. And so ad-supported companies have to use 10x as many ads to get 1/10 the revenue. And these ads can gain more info if they run in the client.
I use uBlock Origin, uMatrix, DuckDuckGo, and HTTPS Everywhere for a mix of adblocking and privacy. uBlock Origin lets you block specific or wildcard DOM elements - literally anything on the page. Sometimes I even block annoying photos that are not ads.
uMatrix lets you block or allow different file types from different domains. By default, you get all CSS and Image files from any site, and all Javascript from the original domain. The drop-down makes it easy to update the allowed file types, then just refresh the page. (The downside is sometimes each refresh will just load 1 more script, so it takes 15 minutes of adding another domain, refreshing, domain, refresh, until the whole capcha or all images load.)
That and the abomination of the technology stack that we use for said process. HTML/CSS/JS is absolutely not the answer for "I want to make a UI", never mind the fact that many UI designers have no clue how the stack works and abuse it horribly.
The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered. DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.
I think it's a recent phenomenon and not related to rendering of ads.
I use Chrome and it's quite common, but not always. I would turn up the developer console and find thousands of errors and warnings when I notice the tab icon keeps blinking. The errors are mostly blocking of third-party plugins, security domain violations or similar content policy enforcement. And it just keeps reloading the same requests.
I don't have any ad blocking or any extension installed so this should be a wide spread thing. It's probably overzealous ad providers ignoring Chrome's security policies.
