The New Hotness

The latest new-to-me off-lease Dell PC arrived with Windows 7, which means that I must install UltraVNC (that’s uvnc.com, not the obvious URL, alas) to enable remote desktop access. Here’s what the download page looks like through a fresh copy of Firefox, without ad blocking:

Notice that the prominent “Start Download” label-and-button in the middle of the page isn’t the one you want, nor are any of the other things that say “Download”. If you’re not a techie and don’t quite know what you’re looking for, there’s no hope for you.

Here’s what it looks like with all the ads suppressed:

Granted, that’s not the most user-friendly download site I’ve ever seen and, most likely, non-techies won’t venture there, but … suppressing the ads certainly eliminates a tremendous amount of noise.

WordPress places ads on my blog and I get a cut of the revenue, so I am not without a certain conflict of interest. I could forego the ad revenue (currently about 60 ¢/day), which wouldn’t eliminate the ads; WordPress simply pockets my cut in addition to theirs. I could also pay WordPress 30 ¢/day to completely suppress the ads (and get other features I don’t care about), for a net cost of a dollar a day to not show ads.

Hey, who wants to sign up as a Patreon donor? [grin]