I for years don't bothered with web ads, but sites got increasingly slow, sometimes some sites would time out after exchanging 10mb of data with ad servers, when the site itself had 300kb or something like that.
So I installed ad blocking to get rid of this issue...
The difference is DRASTIC, not only in performance (it feels like it felt when I switched from dial-up to DSL) but there are no more blinking and flashing stuff anymore, the browser crashes much less (because of badly coded flash ads) and some sites are much better to see the content (example: one of the most popular brazillian newspaper, Folha.com has some flash banner ads that when you mouseover they expand and cover the entire page, the problem it is really easy to unintentionally mouse over them, and then to get rid of them again is really obnoxious)
I've recently taking to switching off Javascript for just this reason. The Chrome extension "Quick Javascript Switcher" does it on a site-by-site basis. No more interstitials, cookie-warning crap, etc.
I'm using RequestPolicy for this. If a site doesn't load completely, just enable a couple of required sources, and you're done. It's an extra step sure, but usually needs to be done just once per site.
Yeah, I've been doing the same. It's not difficult to switch JS on for an individual site if it's something I actually want to use. For most sites, however, killing JS just makes life easier.
So I installed ad blocking to get rid of this issue...
The difference is DRASTIC, not only in performance (it feels like it felt when I switched from dial-up to DSL) but there are no more blinking and flashing stuff anymore, the browser crashes much less (because of badly coded flash ads) and some sites are much better to see the content (example: one of the most popular brazillian newspaper, Folha.com has some flash banner ads that when you mouseover they expand and cover the entire page, the problem it is really easy to unintentionally mouse over them, and then to get rid of them again is really obnoxious)