I recently decided to block ads as well, but for different reasons. For the most part, advertising on the web is something I don’t mind. The deciding factor for me is whether or not it prevents me from seeing the content I want to see. This is what made pop-ups so annoying. They got in the way, and you had to close the pop-up just to see the page you came to see.
Unfortunately advertisers have been using Flash ads to provide the same experience.
It’s the same user experience, but different implementation. (In terms of Firefox development, this is bad because users are told that Firefox has a pop-up blocker, but it doesn’t block these pop-up ads.)
There are also cases where ads push the content out of the view area, forcing you to scroll down.
Sometimes just mousing over the content area of an ad will cause it to expand and prevent you from reading what you want.
Unfortunately, this has become way too common lately, and I finally decided to install Adblock Plus. I understand that many websites rely on ads for revenue, but so did netscape.com. That’s why the Mozilla pop-up blocker was disabled and hidden in Netscape 7. I’m sure something can be worked out, where advertisers are forced to use a technology that cannot get in the way of viewing other website content. If that were to happen, I would bet that a lot less users would have adblockers installed.