Hello there.
I am embarrassedly aware that this question doesn’t really fit in Sitepoint but you guys are the only smart guys I know about, so I guess I have to ask here. If I may please.
When I load a particular news site, it stays frozen for second after agonizing second while a long list of what look like advertising and snooping sites load. They don’t all manifest on the screen, they just come in and delay the browser for quite some time. This is Chrome I’m talking about but I’m sure that it’s the same with all. I can see the site names as they pile through the door.
Is there a generic name for all of this unwelcome stuff and is there a way to just say no?
Thank you for your kind attention.
Pseu
Believe it or not, I tried, but I discovered that it doesn’t work too well to try to Google something that you don’t know the name of…
If you have an example page that is doing it and we can recreate it, someone on here will probably have an answer for you. There’s some smart cookies hanging around here. 
Well, it’s always a mistake to refer to a politically motivated site, but
[noparse]http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/[/noparse]
is sometimes (like today) really bad with this.
MP
As long as it’s safe for work, I think we’re okay with it here.
Today I’m on a fairly slow connection which actually helps so I can see the page load. What you’re seeing are all the ads that this particular page is serving up. When I enable my ad blocker extension the page loads much more smoothly and faster. I use adblocker plus but there are a wide variety of them out there.
That kind of crud is often called by Javascript, so if you disable Javascript then it can sometimes help. Of course, that can cause its own problems.
Content-blocking or ad-blocking is probably the best way to go. I don’t know what it’s like in Chrome, but Opera is always unnecessarily specific. For example, I look in my ‘blocked’ list and it’s showing http://s0.2mdn.net/2768331/*, whereas what I actually want to block is http://s0.2mdn.net/*, so it hits all ads coming off that domain rather than just one in ten million of them. In Opera you can manually edit them to block all contact with particular domains that are giving you grief - that might be the best way to go if Chrome gives you that option.
Political sites, whether left or right, often festoon themselves with tons of ad content. Pajamas Media is very bad for that. Disabling JS is a start, but won’t solve the problem. My solution has always been to stop going to the site, and informing the site owner why I no longer visit. If a lot of people raise sand about the ad issues, the site owner may take steps to reduce the amount of ads he/she is peppering visitors with.
My personal unfavorite is the phenomenon of the double-underlined words where a single mouseover triggers an ad (often from Vibrant Media) and sometimes even a Flash video or presentation. Beyond frustrating.
YES!! It’s almost as bad as having useless music playing on a website.
An ad blocker browser extension has always worked best for me to turn off ads and speed up loading times. Turning off javascript is fine, but I really like having that javascript benefit on many of the websites I frequently visit.