I installed Safari 5 and tried out their new 'Reader' feature. It essentially finds the central text in the page and extracts it out and displays it in a nice reading experience. It removes all the ads and gives you a nice reading experience with basic features like print, email and zoom. Ads on the web today are garish, consume CPU, get in the way of the user experience and never (in my personal experience) useful. Ad blockers in the mainstream could act as a forcing function to make webmasters clean up their act and for the industry to rethink how they try and advertise to consumers. In practice, this has the effect of stripping out all the ads you'd see on a site. This is interesting since this has to be the first mainstream browser with a form of ad-blocking shipping by default. Sure, you have to press a button but the UI for it is prominent (the 'Reader' button is part of the location bar) and this is a short jump away from having this turned on by default.
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