Originally Posted by monitor

And why should anybody care about what kind of banners the ad industry wants to push on us? There are so many simple ways to block them that many of us have never allowed them to clutter up our screens and almost never see any of them. From occasional use of unprotected systems, I have concluded that they rarely, if ever, add any value to my browsing sessions.

As for cookies, nowadays you do need them to perform certain tasks and to allow some sites to work properly, but IMHO there is really no point in allowing most of them to survive the session. Generally, only those carrying your ID for signing in at favorite sites are worth allowing to survive. I would say that many of us have been routinely cleaning out the cookie files since they started showing up in the mid-90s and are now quite happy with the cookie handling tool in Firefox, which saves one quite a lot of cookie cleanout duty.

We can also talk about popups (and their evil spawn, the popunder), which could have been a very useful and elegant technology but which has been so usurped by parasitic advertisers that there is almost no point in allowing them at all. When you get a site that doesn't seem to work, then you can choose whether to allow their popups or to go right over to a competitor that doesn't bother you with this kind of nonsense.