I don't know about you, but I usually have a lot of tabs open in my browser. When I'm researching on the Internet, I might create five to 10 tabs from links in a search result or from a single story to look at next.
If you've opened a lot of tabs very quickly, you know what happens next. You hear an ad start blasting through your computer speakers. Then you have to stop what you're doing and hunt through the pages you just opened to find the video ad and stop it from playing.
It's very annoying. Not only that, if you're on slower hardware, or a mobile gadget, a video ad makes pages load slower, or can drain your data plan.
If you have Google Chrome, however, that's about to change. Google has worked with Adobe on a new Flash feature that's very smart (Reminder: Most online video ads are Flash-based).