Internet Explorer still has useful purpose - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 26, 2016, 04:42:37 am
content: I regularly read the news from a number of different sources, but as you know, advertising is everywhere on the internet and quite frankly, it pisses me off.Over the last 6-12 months, news sites have started getting extra crafty in order to circumvent ad blockers and filters, largely through the use of HTML5 and stylesheets. On one particular news site (smh.com.au) you could be reading an article when all of a sudden the text "splits" and a video ad appears. You can close the ad by clicking on the 'X' but even that takes 2-3 clicks to do anything and forget trying to hit the target on a smartphone display, they deliberately make the "close" button so small you'll most likely end up clicking on the ad itself.So I opened up some of my regular sites on IE8 and ads no longer load (of course as the code they use is not supported). It seems that in their wisdom, news and ad providers are improving their code to work in newer browsers but break and refuse to load in older ones because they aren't maintaining "legacy" code.Take the two examples below, the same site in Firefox and IE8 (I actually had to close a giant ad that covered the whole screen in Firefox before taking this screenshot).So I guess IE8, whilst old, does still serve a purpose and yes, I can still read all the important content without all the disruptions. (Granted that 80% of the "news" content is click-bait crap anyway, but that's another story.)

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2016, 04:46:03 am
content: I also have some older software, that when being installed on a new computer, demands IE. So there are at least two reasons for keeping the old stuff around.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2016, 05:02:09 am
content: Is there some strong reason why you must visit sites that are full of adds? Especially mainstream (lying bastards) 'news' sites like news.com.au ?

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2016, 05:05:03 am
content: I browse with both an adblocker (ublock origin) and a javascript blocker (noscript), which keeps much of this at bay. After years of fixing people's computers and having to deal with malware, I'm not in a position to accept either unless I have a good reason to. There's too much of a disconnect between advertisers and users: if you start shoving video ads in my face and serving my family malware, what do you expect me to do?Occasionally some sites are completely broken without javascript (yurk!). Others pretend to be broken, but can be fixed by disabling style-sheets (Shift+Alt+a with Chris Pedrick's web developer extension). I end up disabling style sheets on many websites anyway because I find they're more readable this way, but that's a personal preference.It sounds like a lot of effort, but everything loads much faster and I don't have to deal with these annoyances. In the end it lets me get done what I want to get done: browse the internet.EDIT:Quote from: TerraHertz on June 26, 2016, 05:02:09 amWe can't tell that until we read their stuff, and even then we can always hope. I'm just as guilty of reading biased sites.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 26, 2016, 05:22:17 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on June 26, 2016, 05:02:09 amI try not to be biased, I like to read articles from all sorts of places, even the mainstream bastards have some interesting stuff from time-to-time.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2016, 02:54:45 pm
content: Ads are nasty. They:- Chew up bandwidth- Make pages load slower- Flashy, page filling, etc. -> it's noise, it's a negative experience on the cognitive load. I visit a news site for the news, not for their layout or ads. Advertisement have never been effective for me, so I prefer to waste as little time as possible on it.- Most of all, it's quite common that large advertisement networks get hacked and malicious banner code is injected. To top things off, these malicious codes are usually fixed hours after infection, potentially infecting millions of PCs when people visit a particular news site 2-3 times a day.I personally make use of the RSS feeds of most sites as extensively as possible. These sites include general news sites RSS feeds plus Reddit, Youtube and other (social media) platforms. By making use of personalized keywords or view counts on those feeds it's easy to sort out the most important news for me. I scan through these lists 1-2 times a day, and I felt I have completely caught up. I may not read unbiased article or both sides of biased articles.. but it's my way of staying productive and the information pipeline streamlined.Ads have no place in this flow, I would strongly recommended doing something against that.