Smilie Ads, Burn in Hell.
Nothing pisses me off more than using Firefox and going to a site with these idiotic, monstrous Flash smilie banners (http://www.smileycentral.com/). Now, most of the Flash I produce - and various random websites with Flash - seem to work fine in Firefox.
I will fly into a fucking rage when I am doing something as simple as looking up text information on IMDB and they have two of these asinine banners on the same page, crashing my Firefox! No one seems to have been able to solve this issue. If you’re a real code head, you can always spend all afternoon tinkering with this issue. Is the problem Macromedia, Firefox or the idiot banner?
In the meantime, I have located the answer to my prayers. Just install into Firefox, use command-shift-F (Mac), right-click (Windows) and get rid of any shitty ads you so choose! Why there’s even filters so you’ll never see the offending ad content ever again. Take that! Classmates dot com! Take THAT! Smilie fucking Central!
Huzzah!
Note: If you’re having the same problem as me, be patient when first filtering these asshole banners, it’ll take a bit of finagling for the filter dialogue to come up.
January 26th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
Hi, can you clarify the exact problem for me, please? I traced back through three websites in your links but saw a number of different problems presented (you’ve got “this banner”, someone else had “any flash”, another symptom was “when you hold mousedown”, there was another digression on “while streaming”, etc).
Basically I’m looking for something where I can tell a testing engineer exactly what to do to exactly see the problem, thanks in advance.
(From what you wrote I get the sense that you’re seeing problems when there are two incidents of a given ad in a page. Assuming other ads do play normally for you, then one of the first things I’d test would be the framerate which that ad’s designers used… some designers specify impossibly-high framerates in the belief that this will look better, but in reality it just overloads stressed systems. Disney liked 12fps, and the human eye can perceive 72fps, for instance.)
For ad-blockers, much can depend on the sites you visit, but using their content without compensation doesn’t seem like it would be sustainable in the long run….
Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support
January 26th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
Hmm, on a re-read I see you linked to an article I wrote about that HTTP1.1 pipelining tip which got passed around uncritically last month. Have you actually read that material, and is a missing component of your description the tidbit that you modded your Firefox that way…?
jd/mm
January 26th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
I may have been rash in my condemnation of Macromedia’s lacksidasical attention to the problem regarding Firefox and Flash.
Thanks for your response again, John.
On an interesting side note, when I looked up “lacksidasical” on dictionary.com I slammed directly into another “smilie” ad and a “basketball” iPod ad that did the same thing with it’s horrendously animation-heavy content.
Gahhhhhhhh!
January 26th, 2005 at 7:10 pm
Just as a small update on this issue, I have sat and reloaded dictionary.com and found that both the iPod Flash banner and a Microsoft Flash banner of the same size (both in ‘physical’ size and animation) do not cause an issue in Firefox.
The ’smilie banner’ still causes the issue whether alone or travelling in pairs.