Ad blocking is supposed to improve performance. If you still need to download ad and then perform additional computations, I, personally, would opt-out from that ad-blocking, it's not hard to ignore ad myself.

> it's not hard to ignore ad myself.

It's a constant cognitive drain on your mental resources. That's even ignoring the fact that almost everyone is influenced by ads to varying degrees.

I’d say it’s not a drain, but even as a long-time ad-blocker, I still am conditioned to ignore things screaming for attention. It’s been very often that I’m looking for something (eg. a link) but I don’t see it because it’s more visible than the rest of the page and my brain is conditioned to filter that out.

> It's a constant cognitive drain on your mental resources.

We reached the point that this is the argument to avoid ads... People will go to such a length to justify blocking ads, it's crazy.

That's always been my primary reason, honestly.

Yes, I also take the Intel Inside stickers off my laptop.

You can ignore ads, but you can't stop these companies from spying against users, which is a much bigger problem.

Yes, I think that's the right approach. You just forgot to mention that in order to prevent tracking a new VM is spun up for fetching each page. (Of course this wouldn't be necessary if the browser were implemented by someone who was on the same side as the user.)

> You just forgot to mention that in order to prevent tracking a new VM is spun up for fetching each page.

Make sure the travel to a different country between clicks. Just in case.

I mean. I think you're joking, but if you use Tor then you're perfectly welcome to make a new circuit per website or whatever.

The other problem with that is that I don't think it will block malware embedded in the ads.

Every once in a while I get a page that buries a CPU core. It's either bad Javascript (most likely) or something mining cryptocurrency on my PC.

That still wouldn't cover trackers and content running in the background, audible ads, ads that pretend to be content in the article you're reading...