Ad Blockers Revisited

A while back (probably before I scrubbed this blog and started over, I'm too lazy to go look right now), I wrote an entry about ad blockers. I settled on the Proxomitron as my ad blocker of choice, and it has served me well. I have since discovered that the Proxomitron (and its evil kid sister, Proximodo) almost work, but they have a minor flaw that is difficult to identify.

I noticed that in FireFox and Opera, Yahoo! Mail is broken. The buttons do not work. This is not so in MSIE, so I assumed that FireFox and Opera have issues. However, I eventually came to the realization that I have all but MSIE pointed to the Proxomitron. When I quit using Proxomitron as a proxy server for FireFox, suddenly Yahoo! Mail started to work as expected. Opera did the same.

So, when using an ad blocker, even one that seemingly works well, expect some things to get broken. Ad blockers rewrite the page for you, and sometimes there are obscure consequences.