The Null Device

Why Firefox Is Blocked

A new front has opened in the War On Intellectual Property Theft: a campaign to block users of the open-source web browser Firefox from websites, because Firefox enables users to block ads ("steal content"):
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus's unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..
Since the makers of Ad Block Plus as well as the filter subscriptions that accompany it refuse to allow website owners control over their own intellectual property, and since FireFox actively endorses Ad Block Plus, the sites linking to this page are now blocking FireFox until the resource theft is stopped.
The site goes on to advise pissed-off Firefox users to switch to Internet Explorer. (Had they some advice to those browsing on Linux, it'd probably look like "get a Windows PC, you bum".)

It is not clear how many sites are participating in the anti-Firefox campaign.

There are 5 comments on "Why Firefox Is Blocked":

Posted by: datakid Sat Aug 18 02:09:26 2007

roflmao. Ad Block Plus, Filterset.g are the two greatest things that have happened to the web since tabbed browsing. Damn, they are the two add-ons that I add on more than anything else when doing new installs (>1 a week, I work part time in tech support). And don't the web look funny when you don't block dem ads? lolz.

Posted by: arthur Sat Aug 18 04:27:24 2007

Oh look! They are quoting Richard "going to the toilet during ad breaks is theft" Posner! Let's all point our fingers and laugh...

Posted by: unixdj Sat Aug 18 16:55:23 2007

Firefox users should just use an add-on that changes the User-Agent HTTP header.

Oh, and whyfirefoxisblocked.com doesn't seem to display in my Firefox.

Posted by: Bizarro Sun Aug 19 08:11:06 2007

ROTFL! "honest, hard-working website owners and developers" - if such things existed we might be inclined to pay - as it is the vast majority of web content is shite and its creators are the 21st Century equivalent of the typing pool.

Posted by: red Sun Aug 19 19:31:45 2007

In their manifesto they say that since Firefox users comprise such a tiny portion of the intarwebz, website owners have nothing to lose by blocking them.

If this is the case, then why block them at all?

Also, this site assumes that everyone with Firefix uses the Adblock extension. Assuming that some portion of Firefox users do not, this blanket blocking effectively shuts out potential ad-clickers.

Either way, utter stupidity.