Ad blocking

Ad blocking or ad filtering is removing or altering advertising content in a webpage. Advertising can exist in a variety of forms including pictures, animations, embedded audio and video, text, or pop-up windows and can employ autoplay of audio and video. All browsers offer some solution to the problem, either by targeting technologies (Adobe Flash/Shockwave, Windows Media Audio files, etc.) that are used to deliver ads, targeting URLs that are the source of ads, or targeting behavioural characteristic of ads (such as the use of HTML5 autoplay of both audio and video).

Benefits

To users, the benefits of ad blocking include quicker loading and cleaner looking web pages free from advertisements, lower resource waste (bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc.), and privacy benefits gained through the exclusion of the tracking and profiling systems of ad delivery platforms. Blocking ads can also save substantial amounts of energy.

Another important aspect is improving security; online advertising subjects users to a higher risk of infecting their devices than surfing porn sites. In a high-profile case malware was distributed through advertisements provided to YouTube by a malicious customer of Google's Doubleclick. In August 2015, a 0-day exploit in Firefox browser was discovered in an advertisement on a website. When Forbes required users to disable ad blocking before viewing their website, those users were immediately served with pop-under malware.