I wanted to link to a SciAm article I have at home. I had some things to say that seemed interesting (to me). A win-win for SciAm and me, especially since they charge for archival access.
Problem is, every time I went to the page Camino/Firefox pegged my CPU at 100%. Scientific American was featuring a BASF (German pharmaceutical company) animated ad that kills Gecko clients (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Netscape, etc) - at least on OS X.
I've now disabled all web advertising display using Camino 1.5's quite excellent built-in blockers. So Scientific American's blunder will disable entire classes of advertising. Perhaps the responsible ad agency should take notice too.
I wonder how many thousands of people have been locked out today (especially if this impacts Firefox/Win as well) how many have responded by enabling full ad blocking, how many won't return to the SciAm web site, how many are reconsidering the value of their SciAm subscriptions...
It takes only one blunder of this magnitude to cost a web site months of work.
I'd try sending them feedback, but of course I'm not going to bother accessing their web site now. In any event, any corporation capable of this type of mistake probably omits the feedback link. Eliminating feedback helps reduce annoying customer interactions.
This is pretty much a universal rule by the way -- any entity, whether human or corporate, that does really dumb stuff is very unlikely to allow feedback. It's pretty much two sides of the same coin.
What a waste.
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