Bill D.

Certainly you can get both the programs and knowledge to "defeat" or otherwise work around this crap; but the real point is that "Flash" - as just one bad example - serves NO PURPOSE OF VALUE TO ME, and is used by the sites only because it allows them to "commercialize" your browsing.

A typical MSNBC "news page" contains an article that should be no more than a 30-40 KB html page, or perhaps 500 KB if there's a large picture; but every page download is at least 2.5 MB, with the excess consisting mostly of links to remote advertising "spot placements" and all the flashy sidebars, popups, animations, etc. Since the links are often to other servers, it requires the "successful cooperation" of as many as a dozen different sites to display a single page. If any one of the Scripted ads fails to load the news page "fails" and is inaccessible until it's fixed, since it loads all the linked ads before displaying the article - giving the MSNBC news site close to a 17% page-failure rate¹ for articles I've attempted to look at during the past couple of months.

And this doesn't include the slide-show and video pages, where there might be some actual justification for a "media program." Embedded ads in what should be "plain text pages" frequently are "Flash" animations.

All for the sake of the advertising(?).

¹ "Coincidentally(?)" the failure rate is nearer 55% for articles relating to "religion" or "art." ???

John