Occasionally, I'll spend a little time before leaving to work looking at the weather radar, or the earliest of the news. The radar loads without problems, but too many news outlets don't.
What's the problem? Junk advertising, pop ups, roll downs, roll overs, photos, embedded videos and animated gifs. They hog resources, slow down loading and I follow my initial thought, which is to close the site and move on...just like some blogs I attempt to read.
When it comes to reading, the less distractions, and waits are most important to me. I think that's one of the reasons Matt Drudge has such a successful site. In moments, I can scan through dozens of links, without distractions.
I use add ons in Pale Moon (firefox) to eliminate the problems you list.
ReplyDeleteAdBlock plus, which does a bang up job and,
PrefBar which allows me to customize what I want to see or use such as turning off flash or images and many others. It is a click box setup on the browser so many pages that I know are ad heavy, I just click off images for that particular page.
Lastly, I use Thumbnail Zoom Plus add on which allows me to hover my mouse arrow over and pictures I might like to see when images are turned off and 98% of the time, the image loads right up.
I use an old laptop, most of the time, running XP.
DeleteAt this time, I don't want to spend the money for a new machine, or software; call it being stingy and curmudgeonly. It's easier for me to just close the cumbersome sites and know I'm not wasting bandwidth on things I could care less about.
I once sat down to lunch with a friend-of-a-friend who happened to be a professional web page designer. He reveled in telling me all about the newest tools that were at his disposal for generating graphics and animations etc. I tried to explain to him that the quickest way to drive me off of a web site is to have too many of those graphics and animations. (Indeed, in some cases *one* is too many.) He looked at me like I had just flown in from Mars.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's a generational thing. I was 50 at the time and he was in his mid-twenties.
Web page designing, from what I've observed, is the most bang for the buck, which unfortunately for old farts like me, is a wasted effort. I can read, usually only shop for what I need, am not interested in the gamut of photos of the barbecue, become annoyed when something pops up and I have to close a window, despise auto-run videos, and am usually disappointed when a link leads to another link, to another, to another....
DeleteI guess I'm just tired and my attention span is becoming shorter.
I'm with you on this. I really dislike the corner peels and sticky sites that don't immediately scroll because 2 gigs of RAM are dedicated to loading all the bells and whistles of in-your-face ads and automated videos that nobody wants to see. At least the ads from the dead tree version of newspapers were actually wanted.
ReplyDeleteSome blogs have tons of photos - and I can understand the blogger's excitement in posting notable parts of their life - but it can be too much. As the page starts crawling, or screeches to a halt, I just close it.
DeleteTHIS SO MUCH THIS. Both local news outlets, for a while, had auto-run video showing ads. The sites are so junked up they look horribly unprofessional. And they take forever to load on my slow old work computer....
ReplyDeleteI tend to think autoplay video should be banned. Yes, I'm sure there's some disabling bit of software I could download, but my workplace doesn't allow us to install our own software (they don't trust us, I guess).
I can read a story faster than than a video, but that's only if the video doesn't prevent me from scrolling, while it loads.
DeleteThat's frustrating.