Is AdBlock for Firefox Stealing or User's Right?

[bvilleuk]

Firefox has gained a lot of popularity among the Internet community because of many useful extensions. One of them is called AdBlock, essential to anyone browsing the Internet today who wishes to remove all the intrusive and flashy ads.

Is is stealing potential revenue from a website when you block their ads? Or is it a user right to do so? One popular filehost site 'MediaFire' seems to disagree. A Firefox add-on has forced this company to give Mozilla a takedown notice.

Obviously this had no legal leg as the end-user has the final say in what appears on their computer. There have been threats from some website owners to target Firefox users and block them. However, this has yet to be followed through by anyone.

[ruudvandan]

I personally hate adverts, but there needs to be a balance. Some way or another web content needs to be paid for, as the people who produce it need to earn a living, so there are 2 realistic options - subscriptions, and advertising.

If we want free websites then we need to put up with the adverts, because if everone blocks the them, then these websites will make no money and disappear.

If Explorer ever gets an ad-blocker (which I doubt will happen, but it might) then there goes website advertising.

What could also happen is programmers write code that circumvents the ads, and we get the same situation that we have now with spammers and spam filters.