[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“This all came to my attention because of a specific
issue my friend was having. Prior to that they had soldiered on in
a world of fudge and making-do because they figured that’s how it
was with “the Internet”. The issue that finally got to them was
that every time they went to a particular section of the BT/Yahoo
home pages, they were presented with an error message. It turned
out it was a javascript debug message — we have all seen them
and most of us know what to do with them (ignore them generally)
but to a non-techie end-user it might as well have been written in
martian. After it kept happening they called me in.“After some careful monitoring I realised that the error was
caused by a particular advert in a banner above their BT/Yahoo
webmail client. I couldn’t fix the bug in the script but I could
find where it was. Now on my system this would be easily resolved
with AdBlock. A single right-click and the problem is gone. On this
one it’s not so easy. Firstly Microsoft’s browser has never really
been suited to blocking advertising — even with a plugin.
Recently an I.E. ad blocker plugin has appeared but of course this
isn’t IE, this is the BT/Yahoo browser so the plugin doesn’t work.
Disabling javascript debug messages has no effect either. In fact
because the settings dialog is identical to IE’s one you can never
be sure which browser the changes will have effect on.”