The Pushdown Effect (Part 1 of 3)

Have you seen ads on your website you're visiting? They are moving some sections of a website depending on their alignment and/or size that most people know these are annoying. The movements are called "pushdowns". A pushdown may be of two types:
1. S-pushdown - In this pushdown, an ad moves a section of a web page because of the former's size and alignment;
2. R-pushdown - In this pushdown, an ad increases the size of a page because of the former's size;
or both.

These pictures are a comparison of what the Friendster profile on Abby Banks display on Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5 with Adblock Plus enabled and Windows Internet Explorer 7 without an ad-blocking add-on:

As it displayed on Firefox 3. My Adblock Plus prevents the ad, and therefore the pushdown, from displaying.
As it displayed on IE 7, without Adblock Pro. The ad and the resulting S-pushdown is shown.

These screenshots show that pushdowns can be "disappeared" from the page by using Adblock Plus for Firefox and Adblock Pro for Internet Explorer. Most websites using PHP and some using other languages used for web pages have ads, and almost half of them have pushdowns. It is better to use these add-ons listed above for the sake of yourself. So next time you visit a website, analyze the page contents and you'll probably see a pushdown or two.

Next month: How about the pushdowns on web pages that contain "Powered by ____Wiki"?