I'm now having problems opening threads. At least the slowness is cutting down on my addiction to flyertalk. :-)

Please then accept my apologies for relating the two happenings and assuming that they were one. It was an easy observation that right after the appearance of one came the other. But in correlating the two I was wrong.

Again, my apologies.

I've never had a problem..............is it because I use Firefox?

Nope, the problem is intermittent

at about 2:30 p.m. hst, slow to nothing.at around 4:00p.m hst running like a champ.

Quite slow loading today. Modest delays due to tribalfusion, then long delays trying to load "pagead2.googlesyndication.com." Doesn't take rocket science to figure out why it was going to THAT website. It appears that if google gets bamboozled running its ad algorithm, it eventually gives up and that's why you sometimes get an empty "sponsored links" box.

I have to admit, however, that I was trolling one last time mainly to see what kinds of ads google would put up. As I've noted elsewhere, I now save my regular reading of FT for home, where I run Firefox with the greasemonkey extension which kills the ads and the boxes they go in both. My impression is that the extension actually keeps Firefox from even going to fetch the ads, so pages load faster as well.

Edited to add: Isn't there something about "BUY the miles you need for a FREE ticket" that smacks of one of those self-contradictory syllogisms people mention, like "military intelligence."

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.

Is it just my connection or has FT been slow the last couple of days? I click on specific forums and go nowhere for a long time.

Seems fine here.

Painfully slow this morning, 8am HST.

Same here. Sometimes pages won't load, and sometimes it will take ages. The worst is when you type a long reply and then get a "Cannot find server" when you try to post and then you go back and everything is gone (some might argue that that is sometimes for the better, though ).

FT very very slow right now.

And when I type a long post, I always highlite it and copy it, just in case.

I often do that also now .

It was okay until about two hours ago and then started crawling.