Originally Posted by magiciansampras
I agree. I don't buy the argument that the slowdowns we see on FT have "nothing to do with ads." My observational evidence suggests this is not true. Often the delay is due to waiting for tribalfusion and the google site.
You make a very valid observation. Most ad-blocking software works because it fools your browser into thinking the ad resides somewhere locally at 127.0.0.1. An edited hosts file does the same thing. Faster to get a blank from disk than an ad stream from an IP address.
Now, throw into the mix that most browsers like IE have only 4 pipes open at once to retrieve a stream. Add more ad streams -- like these new ones!? -- and the browser has to wait till a pipe is open to get the rest of the page.
The Marriott Reward ads alone weren't an issue. But, all of a sudden you have to get 4-6 of these lousy new in-stream adds downloaded too before you have a full page. So you wait longer. And, , if you have a large default of posts per page set in your profile, you wait longer because it inserts an ad every XX posts.
That's the real issue -- dollars to donuts -- IMHO.
And I'm getting slow loading today again.