Your Adblocker Might Be Hiding More Than Just Ads
Update – 5/31/22
I no longer recommend Adblock Plus. uBlock Origin is much better overall, is generally considered one of the best ad and tracker blockers, and is available as an extension for for Chrome, Opera, Edge and Firefox.
TL;DR
- When the “Social Media Buttons” option is ticked in your Adblock settings, real page content can become hidden
I recently discovered this issue when pulling up an old project of mine – Toyota Tacupra. Inspect the below screenshot and see if any part of the home page seems particularly empty.
Now compare it to this screenshot.
You might have noticed that the Instagram sections don’t match up. The second screenshot is accurate – that is how I designed and coded the page. However when I visited the site, I was presented with the contents of the first screenshot.
After a lot of frustration and hair pulling, I figured out why the Instagram content was being hidden.
I dislike ads as much as the next person. I find they can be very distracting and obtrusive, and that is why I use an adblocker extension in Chrome. Specifically, I use Adblock Plus.
The issue is that within the Adblock Plus extension’s settings, I had recently enabled the “Block social media icons tracking” option. Turns out this does more than just block functioning “share” and “like” buttons. It also hides any images with file names relating to social media platforms. Because of this, the Instagram logo, icon and @2jz_tacupra profile feed were all hidden, despite just being “static” images.
In Sum
Consider keeping the “Social Media buttons” option unticked. You never know if real page content is being hidden.
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