Inconsiderate Internet Browsing

Nowadays as nearly everyone has interaction with the Internet in some way, it is important to stop and think about how people might actually be using the Internet. Actually, right now I want to look at how some people might be inconsiderately using the Internet.

There are a few things that I’ve recently realized are inconsiderate browsing habits. To start off with, you must know that for the Firefox browser, there are programs that can be installed called Firefox extensions. I’d like to use a couple as examples of some of the browsing habits that are inconsiderate. However, it must be noted that they are not the actual habit, but they are rather a means to an end.

1. Adblock and Filterset.G Updater are both super extensions that are often the first that I’ll install when I have a new installation of Firefox. Basically they attempt to take the ads out of your Internet browsing experience. And they work very well. Adblock will basically filter out anything that you you specify. It is as easy as right-clicking on an ad and adding it to the list to be blocked. However this takes a long time to build up a reasonable list. Luckily it also allows you to use some pattern matching (similar to regular expressions) to allow you to make your list useful in a shorter list. Basically it allows you to match multiple things with a single pattern.

This is not easy for most people. So in comes the Filterset.G Updater! It uses a master list that someone else has taken the time to create. It will match almost all of the ads that you would have normally encountered. Of course some sites are good enough to get around this. Nevertheless it leads to a pretty ad-free browsing experience that is incomparable to one filled with pop-ups and more ads than content.

The inconsideration involved is this: websites need those ads as a source of revenue. Although I’ve only realized much of this by having my own site, it does make a lot of sense. Many sites that you read are free to use. However, they often need some income in order to stay free. It costs money to host a website (sometimes a good deal of it). When you’re browsing a site with ads, it is similar in idea to watching television with commercials. Television uses the revenue that is garnered by having commercials in order to create the content. Merely by the fact that you’re watching the show (and subsequently in some way affecting the Nielson Ratings), you are allowing the television company to charge more for their commercial time.

Advertising on the Internet works similarly. I’m talking specifically about Google AdSense because I have experience with it, but this valid for almost all other advertisement programs. There are a couple of ways that users help support a site monetarily through their advertisement program.

1. Viewing an ad.  Simply by viewing an ad with the content, users are helping out the site because many ad programs will allow advertisers to purchase space that ends up paying per view (or impression in AdSense speak).  The more views a site gets, the more it gets paid.


2. Clicking on an ad.  This is definitely applicable for all advertisement programs out there because nearly all of them will pay a site publisher (those producing the content for a site) based on how many clicks that an ad gets.  There are a number of ways that a publisher might put ads on their website, but that is another matter entirely.

What does this mean for you? Well I don’t know what it means for you. But for me it means that I will try to browse in a way that supports the website. As I use the Adblock extension, I can easily do this by

1. Clicking the Tools menu


2. Going to the Adblock item


3. Click Whitelist this page or Whitelist this entire site

Whitelisting a site means that you have given that site priority to not have anything blocked by Adblock. To undo this, on the whitelisted paged you can follow the same procedures as above. On top of whitelisting pages/site, you might consider clicking some ads. Don’t think that you’re giving your life away because ads are getting better and better nowadays. Very often they are related to the content that you’re reading (for contextually-based ad programs). So don’t avoid ads like the plague, they do some good by monetarily supporting sites that you are enjoying for free.

1. Fasterfox is another extension that highlights some inconsiderate browsing habits. This extension will basically tweak the Firefox settings to give you a faster browsing experience. This seems very cool because it helps you out as the end-user.

However, this is actually fairly inconsiderate some of the time. The way that this extension works is that you can set how much tweaking you want the extension to do for you. At its extreme, it will prefetch (follow the link and load the page before you actually click on it) pages, open multiple connections to servers, and more. Obviously this puts more a load on the server than is necessary because you will not always click every link in a page nor will you absolutely need to load a page 1 second quicker. By putting an extra load on the server, you are unnecessarily making it harder for the server to serve its content to other people who might want it.

Now, this does not affect low-traffic sites like my own because I could happily handle way more traffic than I currently do. But it does affect higher-traffic sites because they are already closer to being pushed over the edge. And that is just not nice. Other variations of this inconsiderate browsing habit are constantly refreshing pages for no reason, etc.

1. Utilizing Digg is actually somewhat inconsiderate because it often results in a Distributed Denial of Service. Without going into too much detail, this is basically when lots and lots of people will simultaneously access a site and overwhelm its ability to serve pages. This means that either some hardware will go down or people who actually would like to visit a site will not be able to because they are stuck behind everyone else waiting for the page. Granted, I participate in using Digg, but it still can definitely be an inconsiderate browsing habit. Consider using caches that have been made of that page. Hopefully most sites that get dugg will be able to handle the traffic and will actually benefit in some way from it (I try to find good ads to help them out with if I like what they have to say).

In the end, you just basically have to think about how your actions affect others and not just yourself. Apparently, that’s true for life as well.