After reading this article on adblockers and adblocker-blocker-blockers [eff.org], a few thoughts:
- Ads are served by including some code in the main page that fetches resources from a 3rd party.
- Adblockers work by stripping that code after the main page is downloaded, to stop those fetches from happening.
- Adblocker-blocker-blockers have to be designed to fool websites that use adblocker-blockers into believing that at least 1 ad has been served, which is the indicator that the user doesn't have an adblocker running.
What if, then — and this would only be useful for people with decent connections — instead of stopping the ads from loading at all (i.e. discarding the code that fetches ads), we redirected said code to some sandboxed "invisible window"? This invisible window would, from the user perspective, have no graphics and no sound (but would be able to spoof both to report back to the server), and be sandboxed by the browser (no access to the filesystem) it would basically load the ad but direct it straight into the equivalent of /dev/null.
Of course, this kind of implementation is beyond the realm of browser extensions — this would have to be a part of the browser itself.