Yes, Firefox reached a major milestone this week, surpassing 400 million downloads worldwide. But that's just the good news. There's another story swirling around the famously open source web browser - and it's a little less sunny.

Last week, The New York York Times questioned whether the growing popularity of a Firefox extension called AdBlock Plus poses a threat to the ad-driven business models of entertainment, media, and search sites across the web. If enough people install the extension and other ad-killing browser gizmos, The Times asked, could they chip away at the bottom line of companies like CNN, Microsoft, and Google?

With roughly 2.5 million people using AdBlock Plus - and 300,000 to 400,000 more downloading the tool each month, according to its developer - this is certainly a valid question. But there's a second question worth asking, a question looming over the future of Firefox itself.

According to internet rumor, Google provides almost all of the revenue for the Mozilla Corp. - the commercial wing of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox. You know how it works: Google ponies up the dough, and Mozilla ties Firefox to certain Google tools. Most notably, Firefox uses a customized version of Google.com as its default home page.

The question is: As more and more people install AdBlock Plus, which is officially recommended by Mozilla, will Google continue to fund the browser?

When we asked Google for an answer, the company stayed quiet, as it did when The Times came calling. And we're still awaiting an email from Mozilla on the matter. But it isn't hard to connect the dots.

According to a March 2006 rumor trumpeted by Weblogs founder Jason Calacanis, Mozilla pulled in $72m in 2005, and most of that came from Google. In a subsequent blog post, Mozilla board member Chris Blizzard wouldn't verify the rumor, but he said these figures were "not off by an order of magnitude."

Meanwhile, AdBlock can be downloaded from the Mozilla website, where it's listed as one of the most popular Firefox extensions. And yes, it does a wonderful job of blocking ads on Google's AdSense network - not to mention banners served up by DoubleClick, the company Google's trying so very hard to purchase.

View: Full Article
News source: The Register

This is interesting. I don't run any ad-blocking plugins myself for three reasons. First, I understand the cost of running a website, and the little revenue that website owners make off the ads. Second, removing the advertisements from a web page can often botch up the appearance of it. And third, I like to have just as few plugins/extensions running in my web browser as possible. You know what they are capable of, and the web browser is an application that I use for online purchases and banking. It bothers me to think that some plugin written by Joe the home coder is intercepting and modifying my web pages.

This does seem like a problem though, because as much as Google has been pushing FireFox, they are a company built almost entirely on online advertising. It's interesting how many people are using ad-blocking extensions. But has really baffled me for a while now is the number of people using NoScript. I could understand blocking certain features of JavaScript, but by blocking it entirely, you're really screwing up the appearance and functionality of a large number of sites on the net.

The ONLY plugin I use in Kmeleon or Seamonkey IS Adblockplus, just because if I wanted to see ads, I would look for them. In IE6, I use IEPro7.

Blocking ads doesn't screw the site up any worse, for the most part, than those annoying, flash laden ads do, unless you have some site that is so filled with ads, that's the only thing there was to the page anyway.

That's where you get half of your spyware/malware crap from in the first place anyway, also.

don't website makes money on ads only when people CLICK on them??? the way I see this is that by installing Ad-Block, you're saying you don't want to see, hear, or touch ads so what difference does it make??

btw Chug, ABP has the option to either Hide ads instead of Removing them so you don't botch the page you're viewing.

There are so many advertisements splashed everywhere already that I'm sick of it as are a lot of people. Everywhere you go, online or offline, you find advertisements for something. A little control over that is not a bad thing. I don't block all ads either, only those that are annoying which is admittedly a lot but not all.

That also brings up the question, just because x amount of people install the adblock plug-in, how many are actually using it and to what extent? What percentage are blocking all ads and what percentage only block a small number?

If it's costing so much money you need a dozen advertisements on your website it's time to rethink your website and consider either scaling back or requiring paid membership of some form.