blocking ads (was Re: Let's talk NeXT - Re: Steve Jobs -2011)

Keith M wrote: Horribly OT, but I keep wondering about the overhead of that. There must be some grunt-work involved just to see if a URL matches something in its block list, however minor. With the enormous list of sites / domains that it must have to filter these days, that overhead *might* be noticeable to a user (vs. what it would be like if there weren't the offending items in the source markup in the first place). I suspect there might be times where it has to do some access to the remote site too just to maintain layout, even if it's not passing all of the resulting data back to the user (e.g. downloading an image, querying the dimensions, and passing a 'blank' generated image of the same size to the calling process) I wonder what the first instance of paid advertising was? ISTR doing the whole "adding stuff to /etc/hosts to filter it out" somewhere around the mid-90s, but that concept got old fast as more sites hopped on the ad bandwagon. I had a web proxy that I'd written for a job too, so I recall tweaking that to do some filtering against the main sites that I accessed. cheers Jules