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9.5mm Firefox browsers use Adblock Plus Daily (addons.mozilla.org)

5 points by darien ↗ HN
This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-users-use-add-ons/) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?

12 comments

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darien
This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-u...) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?
pavel_lishin
"Is mozilla liable due to promotion?"

Liable for what?

darien
Liable for lost advertising revenue due to the 'defacement' and 'republishing' of copyrighted content under the DMCA. It is a stretch, but America is a litigious nation and the courts have a tendency to rule in favor of big business (because they support the economy). And if the courts wont rule the first time around, there are always lobbyists to help change laws.
habitue
I think it would be a humongous stretch to say it's defacement. The server client model is the important factor I think here. A server sends data to the client to display in a manner it chooses fit. If a browser chooses not to request certain content, or chooses not to display it to the user, there is no defacement going on. If it is legal for there to be rendering differences at all between browsers, I think adblock fits into that gap as well.

As you said however, who knows what crazy justification they will come up with, and what the courts will buy.

darien
I definitely agree with you. Right now I'm trying to get into their argumentative mindset. I think web properties can argue that their copyright extends to HOW the content is displayed. This point is furthered if online sites can prove that their site is generated dynamically based on specific browsers. If they can argue that they manually create different (authorized) versions for different configurations (1 configuration for each browser, os and monitor type), and that all of those configurations contain ads. The courts may find that any configurations outside the site's authorized versions are unauthorized, an infringement of copyright and illegal. To me it almost makes sense. Thoughts?
DEinspanjer
If the web properties could successfully argue that their copyright extends to how the content is displayed, I think it is likely they could get a lot more bang for their buck by suing Microsoft for the mangled content that comes out of the many millions of IE 6 browsers still being used out there. :)

That said, I highly doubt either lawsuit has much of a leg to stand on. Content transformation is a long standing and tacitly accepted feature of web protocols. Caching, zooming, and even assistant technologies such as a screen or braille reader would run afoul this argument.

dflock
I would imagine that if tivo et. al. - or even fast forward buttons - are legal on DVD & PVR's, then I don't see why ad blocking on the web is any different, legally speaking.
darien
Not sure what the legal excuse for tivo's existence is, but I have seen dvds which don't allow the option of ff'ing previews when they are played on a standard topbox dvd player.
moe
The premise that an adblocker would need advertising to flourish is just hilarious.

People don't install adblock when they see an ad for it. They install it when they have been pissed off by intrusive ads once too often.

Hence the main promoter of adblock is the content industry itself with intrusive popup ads, auto-playing audio etc.

DEinspanjer
Please keep in mind that these numbers are not 100% accurate. We do the best we can to parse out the add-on version check pings that this number is based on, but what we don't do is systematically attempt to track users. That means we don't have a cookie that we can rely on to determine exactly how many users are using a particular add-on. We can only count the number of pings.

Firefox will ping for a version check multiple times during the process of a browser upgrade. The user can manually check for updates as many times as they like. There are weird mis-configured proxies that can spam a single ping a hundred times for some reason, and there are browsers that have been recompiled for a variety of reasons that can behave in a non-standard fashion.

In each of these cases, we do the best we can to eliminate spurious or duplicate requests, but because of NAT and DHCP, we can't really rely much on an IP address to determine the validity of a set of requests.

Personally, I'm happy to provide less accurate statistics and be able to feel good that I am not violating Firefox users' privacy. This extends down to things such as not even storing IP addresses in our data warehouse once the access log data has been parsed. Regardless of the fact we have privacy policies that state we won't do anything bad with the data, I prefer to not even have the data available in a database at all.

cmars232
Millimeters?
darien
In finance, MM stands for millions. It can also be MLN.