When moving from page to page, forum to forum, I'm getting long delays with the above message in the taskbar. This has only started happening today.

Not seeing any issues here, but FWIW in my experience the message in the taskbar is *extremely* unreliable when trying to diagnose what domain is actually holding up a page load. Is anyone else seeing LQ slowness today?

--jeremy

Not me.

Thanks, Jeremy. Is there anything I can do to find out where the holdup is?

If you use Firefox there are a couple decent web developer focused extensions that help.

--jeremy

Yeah, I'm using Firefox 3.6. I'll have a look for those extensions.

Seems to be OK now. Fingers crossed. I've installed NoScript in Firefox, but haven't done anything to configure it yet, so whether that's sorted out the problem or not I don't know.

Installing ad block plus adds a massive speed increase.

Thanks, smeezekitty.
Still OK here. No more problems from d1.openx.org.

Firefox' built in pop-up blocker along with NoScript and ABP eliminate about 99% of the dreck that makes web surfing annoying.

Of course, with the caveat that if everyone used them, most websites (including LQ) wouldn't exist
Interestingly, every single member who posted in this thread has enough posts that they shouldn't see any ads on LQ anyway.

--jeremy

Yes but other things like google analytics which is on almost every website on the web get blocked by NoScript as well.

It also keeps one from accidentally opening a 4000 page PDF.

Another nice add on is WOT (Web of Trust) - It helps to keep one away from known bad sites (and even shows "warning" for Experts-Exchange so you don't accidentally stumble into one of their BS posts when choosing from your Google'd results.

Personally I wouldn't mind ads if they were simply images loaded on the servers I visited as they were in the early days. However, with the advent of pop-ups and other annoying things that made web pages hard to see and the fact that most ads these days are links to other servers than the ones visited I feel no compunction blocking all of them. It's one thing for a company to try to get its message out - it's another thing to hijack my resources and obfuscate real content to do it.

Of course this isn't unique to the web. When loud annoying commercials pop up on the TV I immediately change the channel or mute it. If they would just leave it at normal volume I might actually watch the commercial (and often do). Some are quite amusing like the Geico ones. On radio I almost automatically change the station once commercials come on.