Remember when Google introduced text-only ads to replace flashing animated banners and pop-up ads popular at the time? I didn’t mind those and I didn’t need an adblocker.
Nowadays YouTube is the primary reason I have to use an adblocker. It is literally unusable with all the ads.
I was using adblockers well before Google existed since the internet was already full of that shit by the time they came around. Actually was kind of a selling point for them back in the day; no clutter, no ads, simple layout, great results.
My, how the mighty have fallen…
Back in the day you accepted it because it wasn’t full on tracking you, wasn’t building profiles on you, wasn’t infiltrating all your search history just to sell you shit. It was a banner, you clicked or you didn’t. Enshittification hadnt happened.
Now? Block it all!!
Were the adblockers in the mid 90s blocking parts of pages like banner ads, or were they just the popup blockers? I think I may have used the latter.
They didn’t block the entire element, but they blocked banners and in-page ads somehow. You’d just see a broken image icon where the ad would normally be and it wouldn’t be a clickable link.
The popup banners were the real things you’re killing. Some sites would have popups that had their own popups, so you open the wrong page (without an ad blocker) and it’s like a recursive loop of popups constantly popping up, consuming all resources on the PC until it blue screened.
They were crude by today’s standards, often just blocking entire domains.