Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

https://palant.de/2014/07/29/which-is-better-adblock-or-adblock-plus

by XzetaU8 • 12 years ago

336 174 12 years ago

palant.de

sogen2• 12 years ago

I'm loving ublock https://github.com/gorhill/ublock

sudorank• 12 years ago

Sounds interesting, might check it out tonight.

sogen2• 12 years ago

really do, I've found it's the easiest to use, and lightweight too.

dublinben• 12 years ago

I really wish this was available for Firefox.

jobu2• 12 years ago

That looks pretty interesting, but Holy Options Batman! There are almost 50 filter lists plus a bunch of other settings.

Thanks for recommending this - looks a little less shady than some of the AdBlock variants.

diminoten4• 12 years ago

Ooh, whitelisting of ads via partnerships. That's shady as fuck for an ad blocking company.

eik3_de• 12 years ago

see http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over...

I'd never use Adblock Plus, that's more than shady

mer10z• 12 years ago

Adblock Edge is a fork of the Adblock Plus version 2.1.2 extension for blocking advertisements on the web, without sponsored ads whitelist.

jobu2• 12 years ago

Not sure why you were downvoted. Assuming that wikipedia entry is correct (which is sometimes questionable) then it looks like both AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are being shady as hell with their "strategic partners".

Gracana• 12 years ago

I don't like it either, but on the other hand, ABP works pretty well, and I can uncheck the "allow unobtrusive advertising" on the main settings page. Is it worth making a stand on this issue? What should I do or use instead?

[edit] Hmm, I'm not just talking to myself here, the post I replied to is gone. Not sure how that happens, but in any case I was responding to a comment about how ABP whitelists certain ads (such as those from the companies that support the ABP servers, apparently.)

diminoten4• 12 years ago

Well, I'd suggest using nothing (or noscript if you're actually just concerned about exploits), but if this Internet community is like any other Internet community, I'm probably in a very small minority.

I actually have pretty strong opinions on the matter, but they're entirely tangential and irrelevant, and not really in the spirit of HN, so I'll keep them to myself.

nkozyra• 12 years ago

The argument is that they're not blocking all ads, but they're blocking ads of poor quality, are overtly disruptive (ostensibly the name of the game in advertising) or are potentially harmful to users.

Which is why you can opt in/out of things like Google Adwords.

valarauca12• 12 years ago

They aren't is the problem.

Adblock Plus has created a group of 'guide lines', companies who agree to follow their guide lines will have their ad's hosted.

The problem is every company does not want to work directly the Adblock Plus. So a company (Pagefair) created adblock plus get around as a service, where if you work with them they get your ads around adblock by registering with Pagefair and adblock plus signing off on 99.5% of all all pagefair ads.

Basically adblock is attempting to create a standard for ads, or at least sells that they are. The problem is the volume of ads that PageFair hosts are beyond the review of single entity. There is no intensive to review these ads, as it would hurt their income AND require more labor (or at least require an analytic investment).

Ultimately all that Adblock Plus does is give Eyeo a monopoly on ads.

mhaymo6• 12 years ago

It does feel shady, but on the other hand I can't really argue with their logic:

- ads are an important revenue stream on the web, so allow unintrusive/inoffensive ads by default

- to do this, companies need to agree to keep all ads under a certain URL pattern "unintrusive" by ABP's definition

- investigating and enforcing the nature of the ads in the whitelist costs money, so make this service free for "small to medium" businesses but charge large ones.

Companies may be hurt by people choosing to block ads, but they're not hurt by Adblock Plus offering them a chance to have their ads unblocked. And users aren't hurt either, as if they don't like the whitelisting they can simply turn it off. It seems to me that if you're ok with adblocking, there's no reason to protest ABP's whitelisting practices.

schnevets• 12 years ago

Agreed. Most countries have an organization to regulate broadcasts, removing advertising that is too obtrusive, obscene, or otherwise unfit for mass consumption. Likewise, filtering malware sites, porn ads (in improper places), and flickering banners seems like a win to me. I am in favor of Adblock Plus' mission, I just wish they were more transparent about their business practices and revenue. This seems like the purpose of a non-profit organization moreso than the job of a few developers.

diminoten4• 12 years ago

It'd be a shame if anything were to... happen to the ads on your site.

eli4• 12 years ago

I think it makes sense, though the fact that the whitelisting costs money creates some perverse incentives.

People use adblock for different reasons though: some are actually against advertising as a concept, full stop.

leephillips2• 12 years ago

Privoxy.

Theodores• 12 years ago

I think you are right. However not a lot of people use privoxy compared to the many users of adblock-whatever. Also there aren't many people putting together their own squid3 build with custom list of sites to block.

Neither of these tools take that much effort to setup on a linux machine if you know what you are doing and have a rough idea of how the internet works.

Consequently, for people that cannot be bothered to invest the 10-20 minutes to get privoxy working, the less than perfect solutions offered by the adblock-whatever freebees are okay by me.

leephillips2• 12 years ago

Everything you say is quite sensible. I mentioned privoxy here because obviously a large fraction of the HN audience would be comfortable setting it up.

It's worth at least knowing about because of its generality: it filters and transforms the incoming data before it gets to your browser, so it's irrelevant which browser you're using. It can run on your local machine or you can put it on a server and connect through an ssh tunnel, bypassing web filters and snooping (very good for frequent travelers). When used remotely it can compensate for slow local connections by, for example, compressing images.

seanp2k2• 12 years ago

I run privoxy locally on OSX and I like that it runs in a separate process (AB+ with a few dozen tabs open really sucks up RAM) and blocks ads on other things too (twitter clients come to mind) when set up as a system proxy. It's not the most straightforward thing to configure, but once you figure it out it's pretty great. I've never seen it donk up my pages like some of the old proxies used to; this stuff has come a long way in the past decade.

There are also a few scripts around that will fetch AB+-format lists and convert them into privoxy lists. Here's a decent intro: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/privoxy

Also https://hackage.haskell.org/package/adblock2privoxy

On a router: http://blog.vanutsteen.nl/2014/01/05/installing-privoxy-with...

erkose• 12 years ago

Privoxy can not remove content Ads from encrypted sources. For example, the Ads google places before and after search result content.

beaumartinez• 12 years ago

I've posted this on previous ad blocking threads, and I'll post it again because I think it's very relevant—

"Adblock without the plus" isn't the original Adblock (from which Adblock Plus was forked), it's an extension created for Google Chrome once Google Chrome enabled support for extensions. Very disingenuous name. It piggy-backed on the work already done for Adblock Plus (for Firefox).
Adblock Plus for Google Chrome came much later.

Nowadays, I use and recommend HTTP switchboard[0]. It's fully open[1], and offers very powerful customization on what exactly to block on a site.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/http-switchboard/m...

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard

aen0• 12 years ago

I highly recommends HTTPS Switchboard or uBlock (same author). They are both faster and better than any Adblocker out there.

wernercd2• 12 years ago

This looks like something worth playing with. How does this overlay with other tools like Ghostery? Are there any other tools worth mentioning?

webwanderings4• 12 years ago

Giving ublock a try. Going to turn off Adblock Plus while I run it. Will see how it goes.

nodata• 12 years ago

Does it come prebaked with categories of URLs?

packetlss• 12 years ago

Yes.

Have a look at https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/HTTP-Switchb...

If you just want Adblocking functionality check out https://github.com/gorhill/ublock

Same author as HTTPSB.

13throwaway• 12 years ago

That looks amazing. Is there anything similar for Firefox?

Edit: relevant issue: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/86

autodidakto• 12 years ago

No. They're working on a firefox port, but it will take some time (you can checkout the github issue). It's the only extension I really envy.

Firefox does have Adblock Edge (open source adblock without the silliness).

webwanderings4• 12 years ago

Has anyone here replaced Adblock+ and Ghostery with only uBlock? I'd prefer least minimum extensions when possible. Does uBlock provides what Ghostery does? Or do I have to get SwitchBoard to have the Ghostery alternative?

gorhill4• 12 years ago

I run benchmarks to drive development. So you may want to look once in a while at that page:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-and-other...

The raw data is published at the top as a spreadsheet, and from it you could see what one blocks that another didn't block or vice versa.

So using the raw data of the latest benchmark, here is the diff:

http://www.diffchecker.com/ibszp9gf

Of course, this is for the lists and settings used for the benchmark. More lists can be selected, and settings adjusted one way or another.

Edit: Just to clarify, this shows what was not blocked.

jafaku• 12 years ago

But HTTPSB is only for Chrome? If so, meh.

freehunter3• 12 years ago

Yeah, why would I go through all the effort to block advertising, tracking, and other ways of monitoring what I'm doing and then after all of that, use Chrome? I don't try to hide myself from Facebook then make a post about it on my friend's wall...

gorhill4• 12 years ago

HTTPSB is for Chromium, but I expect it to work on most Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera, Yandex, Maxthon, etc.)

Edit: I personally block domains in global rules which are rather ubiquitous: `google.com`, `twitter.com`, `facebook.com`, `linkedin.com`, `gravatar.com`, etc. I enable these narrowly using scopes only when on a related web sites. I am pretty confident this cripples severely the ability of these ubiquitous servers to track me, regardless of the browser used.

leeoniya• 12 years ago

i havent used Adblock Plus in some time. A combination of Noscript blocking third party js (with some domains/cdns whitelisted) and Ghostery takes care of 90% of annoying stuff without bloating mem usage and improving page load speed drastically.

callesgg2• 12 years ago

I have a long /etc/host file with many of the worst tracking/ad services that i have found. Blocks of a very large portion of the stuff that i do not like.

freshyill• 12 years ago

I would love to see this list! Could you post it in a Gist or somewhere?

mayneack• 12 years ago

Here's one: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

wernercd2• 12 years ago

http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman

Good tool for adding lists to your hosts file.

callesgg2• 12 years ago

https://gist.github.com/callesg/fd9fd96a741da5e779be

Was probably a year since i last touched it, so it could probably use some updating.

DrJokepu• 12 years ago

Sadly, that wreaks havoc with zsh autocompletion.

josho• 12 years ago

I've been tempted to one up this approach by running a local DNS server that will direct all those ad hosts to a local server, then write a simple web app that will handle all those requests by serving up motivational quotes instead of ads.

The upside here is it becomes an effective adblock for iOS when on the local network. I'm not sure how to extend this so that it will work when my iPhone is on an LTE network.

xeroaura• 12 years ago

I think you could set up a proxy server and use Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility to load a proxy for cellular data use. If you're jailbroken, you could also put a host file directly on the device, but it does slow it down a bit.

zz12• 12 years ago

You mean like http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/ ?

miah_2• 12 years ago

Adblock Edge, since it doesn't contain the 'paid for exemptions' (aka ads).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

"Adblock Edge is a fork of the Adblock Plus version 2.1.2 extension for blocking advertisements on the web. This fork will provide the same features as Adblock Plus 2.X and higher but without "acceptable ads" feature. Adblock Edge was primarily branched off from Adblock Plus 2.1.2 source code package "http://adblockplus.org/downloads/adblockplus-2.1.2-source.tg... created by Wladimir Palant."

mhaymo6• 12 years ago

There's a setting in Adblock Plus that allows you to turn the "unintrusive ads" whitelist off. You don't need a separate add-on. I haven't felt the need to change the setting.

miah_2• 12 years ago

Ya, I'd rather not give them money if their policy is to allow some ads if given $.

Karunamon4• 12 years ago

As far as I'm concerned, this is like a malware author asking an antivirus company to not detect some things. And the company acquiescing, because there's no real harm.

But in the end, it's all still malware.

In other words, it's a pretty massive conflict of interest.

If I wanted to look at ads, I wouldn't have installed an ad blocking plugin. Combined with the "private" list that nobody can see, there is plenty of reason to use a fork that has no such conflicts.

billmalarky• 12 years ago

So are you saying that adblock allows certain publishers to pay them to have their ads go through adblock? How is that anything other than a extortion racket?

x1798DE• 12 years ago

Adblock maintains a curated whitelist of approved, unobtrustive ads that most people don't mind seeing (text ads, etc). Last I heard, big companies wanting to submit their ads to the whitelist pay a fee, while small companies can have theirs added to the list for free - presumably this is justified based on the volume of ads that would be added to the list. There's a setting in the Adblock preferences to block even ads on the whitelist.

Some people make it out to be something sinister, potentially because "show unobtrustive ads" is on by default. Given that most people haven't even noticed that they're seeing these ads, I'm not convinced it's a big deal.

id2• 12 years ago

Adblock Edge is 2.1.3 (June 12, 2014)

Adblock Plus is 2.6.4 (July 22, 2014)

I really want to use Adblock Edge instead of just unchecking the "Allow non-instrusive advertising" option, but I somehow doubt they have still the same features.

me_bx• 12 years ago

what feature is missing from Adblock edge?

rmorabia• 12 years ago

Does anyone have any evidence against Adblock Edge?

plicense• 12 years ago

Without a doubt, Adblock.

WorldWideWayne• 12 years ago

Oh, I heard something like this on Reddit and I still got them confused because I started using "Adblock" instead of "Adblock Plus". Reading this today I realize that I should have been using "Plus".

I think I'm going to abandon both of them and try out some of the alternatives listed here (ublock, http switchboard).

616c4• 12 years ago

If people prefer more extreme solutions:

I eventually moved to Conkeror (think Firefox, but with Emacs bindings and Emacs-like extension via javascript; I know cue the egg throwing). I was looking at other browsers to replace Firefox, as I got sick of it, and I picked Conkeror.

Conkeror has a neat little feature called content-policy. I can block kinds of crap per session or site (Flash, JS, Fonts, Object tags, Images, you name it). I use this and by default all our blocked completely. I can reload a buffer when I need it (even on HN I leave all this crap off). I used NoScript before and I like this as more basic and defensive tool built into the browser core. Check it out.

For when I do use Javascript (this is on Linux of course), I uses hostsblock[0] to redirect all blacklisted sites in /etc/hosts to a local DNS proxy on 127.0.01 on my laptop (dnsmasq, which we all probably know, and you could set it up upstream on a router or server for a group of people). Then I use kwakd as recommended to serve white space for all these redirected domains.

The end result, now I open up JS when I need, and like 100,000 domains are blocked. I check when certain shady domains are mentioned to look for stones unturned, and I rarely see exceptions that are not listed (by default even no cookie YouTube domains are blocked, so JS-less pages give you a blank YouTube box on sites a lot).

So why all this effort? Because this is the second or third time I read "ad-blocking company not as dedicated as you think to your principles" articles. And people who argue "my website needs your ad revenue" you ask? Honestly, fuck 'em. I can't be bothered. Be adults, as you do not believe in legislation on Minority Report-like ads following me around in realtime while I walk in public or forcing my eyes open to read newspaper and billboards just for ads, I think I have the right to voluntarily ignore them as I will not buy your shit or shill for you anyway and it is waste of both of our time. I do not mandate everyone look away, but give me the privilege too thank you very much. And I know a company cannot be trusted long term to defend this right as it is not in their interest, especially if it is their core model ad companies (all mentioned here Adblock, Ghostery, disconnect.me will change their tune if they have not already say).

In short, do not use corporate-backed tools for this. Said companies always change their mind.

[0] More info here: http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2013/12/28/hostsblock/

UPDATE: Fixed cue typo. Thanks for pointing it out, Thomas, whoever you are.

fonosip• 12 years ago

DNS based Adblock, profile and Malware block. Make your Internet Faster and Safer with free http://BA.net/adblock

mhurron• 12 years ago

Too bad they don't make the DNS entries they block public.

616c4• 12 years ago

You do realize given what I wrote I would never use that, right? And for others, if we cannot trust their ad-blocking, why we would trust them with our DNS? If I wanted badly implemented filtering I would stick with: my own ISP, OpenDNS, this, in that particular order.

lmm• 12 years ago

That's a really unfortunate name for a browser given that Konqueror already exists (and is a really good, underappreciated browser).

616c4• 12 years ago

Haha. Well if you check out the wiki I think it was not intentional (they name it after a local beer IIRC).

lanstein• 12 years ago

More on this: "At the heart of Konqueror is the KHTML rendering engine (which was chosen by Apple to create WebKit, which today forms the basis for modern browsers like Safari and Chrome)."

http://www.konqueror.org/features/browser.php

hyyypr• 12 years ago

Lots of info here thanks!

I currently use the list provided here [0] which is pretty comprehensive, and just append it to my /etc/hosts file manually; updating it evry now and then is good enough. My question is, why do you need dnsmasq (other than for speeding up dns queries), and why do yo need to serve a blank page instead of simply redirecting network requests to /dev/null?

And I use uzbl [1] for browsing, which is a neat little webkit based browser, with Vim like controls, and stripped to the bare minimum, thus the need for an alternative to adBlock.

[0] http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

[1] http://www.uzbl.org/

616c4• 12 years ago

Well, the dnsmasq I can use for other things. I think I read on the Arch Linux BBS it would improve performance and speed, but I am claiming empiricism on someone else's behalf which is the descent into a badly administered computer.

The blank page serving is one parth aesthetic, one part performant. It looks better, and also certain Javascript items (for instance very persistent stuff like Google CDNs and the other players) time out even with this sometimes. Without, many pages would take ages to load with timeouts in HTML, CSS, JS, you name it.

So, it sounds like we are in a similar boat, so I thought I would let you check out my rig. I tried to get into uzbl, but Conkeror and LuaKit were more my style. I kept adding and removing LuaKit, because there is something I feel at home with in Conkeror (I think it is the Xulrunner/Firefox core, so I have been deploying custom kiosks in computer labs with auto-login and heavily modded Firefox instances with crazy user-pref for ages now).

Of course the mileage of others will vary.

Vanayad• 12 years ago

I keep seeing people complaining about some ads being not filtered by ABP...why not just right click those ads and block them. No more ads. Haven't had any with it on for some time (except on some sites where I want to see the ads to help those specific communities)

rkrkrk21• 12 years ago

I use both of them so i wont care reading this post. All that matters to em to me is the I should not be wasting 15 seconds of my life in watching ads on youtube videos and the combo of ad block and ad block plus does it well for me.

emrikol• 12 years ago

What I've wanted for some time, and it seems hard for me to find, is a good ad blocker that only works on blacklists. I don't mind ads on some sites as long as they're non-intrusive. Once they start getting in the way of the content though, I want to blacklist the site. Everything I've seen so far (although I haven't put a LOT of time into searching) only works on all sites by default and you have to whitelist the ones you want to have ads enabled on.

walden42• 12 years ago

This is the feature I'm missing from the Firefox Adblock Plus. One of the Adblocks for Chrome has this (can't remember which one) and it was great. I only blocked ads on the site I wanted to. Hopefully they'll make it for Firefox.

nathan_long2• 12 years ago

You can do this with AdBlock for Chrome - just unsubscribe from all the lists and add your own custom filters. The simplest way to block something yourself is just to right-click it and go through the menu.

andyl• 12 years ago

A great solution is to run DNSMASQ on your local network, and configure it to block unwanted domains. That way it works on any connected device automatically, with no plugins or browser overhead.

There are plenty of guides - google it!

dbg31415• 12 years ago

Changing your hosts file will work great.

* http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts

crb• 12 years ago

Isn't Disconnect.me broadly, another "tracking-blocker"? How would Adblock be able to 'monetize' through installing it?

wreegab3• 12 years ago

I pretty much all agree with all of Wladimir Palant's post.

But I also have one problem regarding Adblock Plus' "acceptable ads" openness.

When I read about their "acceptable ads" approach, I am led to believe the "acceptable ads" list contains all the sites which are whitelisted for purpose of "acceptable ads". I am invited to consult the list to see for myself which sites qualify.[1]

Problem is, many web sites are not whitelisted through that publicly available list, but through the x-adblock-key HTTP header (which is not something disclosed up front to users).

So in fact there is really a public list and a private list it appears (through the x-adblock-key header), while the public list is presented as all there is to "acceptable ads".

[1] https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#list

martin564• 12 years ago

No, there is no private list. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104070

heromat• 12 years ago

He surely just forgot to mention that Google allegedly payed 25 million € to Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, in order to participate in the "acceptable ads" program, a "feature" which is turned on by default and allows users to "surf more comfortably". And that he is (or at least was) one of the directors.

I'm most certain that there are people out there who would call this business model "blackmailing", but I could also be wrong.

Source (in german): http://www.welt.de/wall-street-journal/article124441049/Goog...

apetresc• 12 years ago

I'm most certain that there are people out there who would call this business model "blackmailing", but I could also be wrong.

They would be wrong. It's not a great practice, but it's certainly not blackmail.

cdr• 12 years ago

Corrupt, yes, but blackmail isn't quite right. More like private security offering to look the other way if you can pay enough to make it worth their while.

kefka• 12 years ago

It honestly looks like a mixture of blackmail and Tortious interference.

Blackmail: pay us or we will cut your advertising revenue. Tortious interference: Your company counts on (double_digit)% ad revenue. We're going to harm you in significant ways... unless you pay.

ntaso• 12 years ago

Story behind it:

AdBlock Plus is installed on an extremely large sum of devices in Germany. I read somewhere close to 25% with non-technical users (!) and 50% among technical users.

What they basically did is to approach companies like newspapers (Spiegel Online) and told them: Look, if you pay $LARGE_SUM, we will whitelist you. Otherwise, since 25-50% of Germans use our software, your advertisement won't make you much money.

I'm not a law expert and I guess technically, it isn't called blackmailing, but then it is, sort of. It's a dark-grey zone which discriminates against smaller companies that can't afford to pay and heck, who gives Eyeo the right to decide over the business models of other websites?

If nobody was shown ads, then all would be in the same boat again. But this way, there's a privileged class of companies that may have ads enabled.

lazyant• 12 years ago

Not blackmail (threatening to reveal a secret, esp. to the police) but more like extortion.

marco12• 12 years ago

This is not blackmailing but a mafia-like protection racket scheme: They create a problem (ads not showing up) that they offer the solution for themselves as well (white-labeling).

YZF• 12 years ago

The problem is that advertisers' business model essentially relies on the silent cooperation of the consumer. The ads are rendered on my device which is under my control. I'm under no obligation to render any content from anyone who buys ads from anybody. Not to mention the advertisers are using my $'s to push content to my device.

The amazing thing is that this business model continues to operate reasonably successfully and that more people aren't actively working against it. On the other side of this, I think the "extortion" business model is limited because there'll be alternate providers of ad blockers. To some extent we've seen similar tactics in the TV world with digital video recorders that allow you to mask/fast forward through commercials.

Now one might argue that the way content providers can fund good content is through advertising, which is true to some extent but it's not a very fair or reliable business model.

radley2• 12 years ago

AdBlock Plus sold out. Google's Sponsored features continue to be automatically white-listed as part of that deal, even when "acceptable ads" is not selected. You can't block them using Element Hiding Helper.

AdBlock Edge is the only true ad blocker:

http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1mcsko/adblock_edge...

millzlane• 12 years ago

I mentioned this on wladimirs blog a few hours ago and he's yet to approve my comment. I asked if he knew about it and what he though about it.

chmars2• 12 years ago

I use Adblock Plus based on EasyList and I do not get any ads from Google. But that might be my custom configuration …

crystaln• 12 years ago

"even when "acceptable ads" is not selected. You can't block them using Element Hiding Helper."

Is this true? After disabling the non-obtrusive ads, I don't see any ads anywhere. Can you give an example of an ad bypassing this feature entirely?

iLoch2• 12 years ago

I wouldn't call it blackmailing. It's flat out extortion; they build a script that blocks ads for specific domains then tell the owners they can pay to have it removed.

chmars2• 12 years ago

To be fair: Adblock Plus does not simply block ads on some specific domains, EasyList and other filter lists are pretty extensive. I do not like the business model either but how else could they make the necessary profits?

Adblock Plus (and similar add-ons) were not created because of such a business model but because of annoying and sometimes even dangerous ads.

worklogin• 12 years ago

I wouldn't mind unobtrusive ads to be whitelisted, were the man not charging money for the service.

Ads aren't inherently "wrong". people tend to block ads because many are unsightly, bandwidth consuming, etc.

Simple ads that don't have JS, don't have trackers, and blend with a site should be encouraged. But making beaucoup money on extortion payments is pretty bad.

bowlofpetunias2• 12 years ago

There's no such thing as "unobtrusive ads". If they weren't obtrusive, they would be either decoration or information, not ads.

Istof• 12 years ago

usually bandwidth, or unsightliness is not the main problem... they distract so much from the content that sometimes it can be almost impossible to differentiate the two.

drcube• 12 years ago

Ads aren't inherently "wrong".

Yes, psychologically manipulating people and lying to them for money is wrong.

marco12• 12 years ago

With more than 17 million users and their mafia-like business model (i.e. protection racket), they have been able to pay for at least 15 employees. Not bad for a free browser add-on. German source: http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-...

FractalNerve2• 12 years ago

Free Alternative that exists since since 1996!!! It's much faster and browser independent. Based on "Proxy Auto-Config". It blocks most ads really well. Having a referrer- ,cookie- and ua-srting blocker also comes handy. Ad-Block Plus or anything else won't hide your personal details that your browser submits.

http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/

cbsmith• 12 years ago

I think there are people out there that would call this business model "finding the least objectionable and most useful way for users to fund the development of the tool they value".

modzoo• 12 years ago

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

"whitelisting websites if they serve only acceptable ads turned out unrealistic – nobody would do that right now. There needs to be more incentive to use acceptable advertising first."

https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-by-the-numbers

avani• 12 years ago

Since a lot of people are running out to download Adblock Plus, you guys might want to contact Google to try and get the spam app "Adblock Plus" from exgam.com removed from the store. Apps typically show up above extensions, so I've already seen several people download the wrong one :/ .

motters• 12 years ago

Adblock Edge is the better version, since it genuinely blocks ads, whereas Adblock Plus still lets some through by default.

rurban• 12 years ago

"Privacy Badger" is the only option nowadays.

No whitelisting, and no corrupt companies behind, doing the whitelisting.

conesus• 12 years ago

Adblock is the #1 culprit for bugs on NewsBlur. I get at least one report a day where some functionality is broken (sharing stories, saving stories, loading a user's feed list, etc). First thing I do now is ask them to disable Adblock.

Doesn't even matter if they've told me if they have Adblock installed. I just assume if some random functionality is broken on my single-page site, it's Adblock's fault.

I suppose I should look for a way to identify if a user is using Adblock, though I bet they've made that as difficult as possible. And if I identify a user using Adblock, I should let them know it's the cause of any bugginess.

fournm• 12 years ago

It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be causing my issues (minor annoyances so I didn't even think to report them, as a pentadactyl and vimium user I'm used to stuff randomly breaking).

I'll have to remember to disable it on newsblur.

freehunter3• 12 years ago

As an Adblock user, I always assume that any errors on any site are the result of Adblock, and my first troubleshooting step is to turn it off. It almost always is.

visarga• 12 years ago

I use AdBlock Plus and Disconnect Me on Chrome and my first step is to whitelist the site in Disconnect Me when it fails to work correctly.

GhotiFish3• 12 years ago

I'd recommend against this strategy, in general, why would some core functionality of a website depend on the ability to contact ad servers? Sounds like a way to pressure people into not using ad blockers, and the threat needs to be responded to (and can be responded to) by that ad block.

It's a really shitty game they are playing, because content providers can't win, but they can make the internet much worse.

eli4• 12 years ago

I wrote a quick and dirty AdBlock detector a while back: https://github.com/elidickinson/ad-block-test

Haven't looked at that code in a while. It probably needs some updating, but the core idea is simple: create something that looks like an ad and then check if it's still visible.

Macha2• 12 years ago

Doesn't seem to detect ABP 2.6.4 on FF for me.

igravious• 12 years ago

I suppose I should look for a way to identify if a user is using Adblock

Some sites I visit detect that I am running Adblock and ask me nicely to disable it because they rely on advertising for revenue. I'll try to post which sites do that and maybe you can work from there.

Maybe there should be an Internet Ads Protocol RFC or some HTTP header or I don't know, something anyway...

discardorama• 12 years ago

I wouldn't mind ads if they didn't completely destroy the viewing experience on many sites. From the long load times (oftentimes the browser rendering will hang because some stupid JS from an ad server has trouble loading), to the distracting ads, it's a huge mess. That is why I use Ad Blocking.

msoad• 12 years ago

Maybe it sounds stupid, but I have both on my Chrome so whichever whitelists the other will remove. Problem solved!

I have never ever seen ads since then

recursive• 12 years ago

I don't have this problem because I just choose not to use sites that have disrupting advertising.

nimish• 12 years ago

Use HTTP Switchboard. Faster, more powerful, and honest.

junto• 12 years ago

Although the naming of the two projects appears to be problematic at first, I'm guessing that many users will pick the Adblock PLUS over the Adblock, simply because 'Plus' feels like a superlative.

dudus• 12 years ago

<rant>

Blocking ads is such a dick move. This should be made illegal. You are not entitled to change a website to your contempt and cut their main revenue source. If you want to use a website/app and it was made available with the Ad, then just suck it in or use a different one.

To my eyes this is not very different than piracy. Where you use a software without paying for it's price.

Advertising is the price you pay to use a service. Targeting is a technology to make that Ad as much relevant to you as possible. And yet there's a lot of negativity in here towards both. It's supposed to be a win-win-win solution for advertisers, publishers and users and yet are met with negativity and FUD.

If you are here in HN you should think the same, because advertisement is what funds the industry you are in.

</rant>

ntumlin• 12 years ago

While I agree that ads are a good thing for the internet as a whole, I certainly have the right to change what my computer does and shows me. The idea of making it illegal to block ads and modify webpages locally is so absurd I can't wrap my head around it. I don't even see how that could be enforced.

goblin89• 12 years ago

The idea of making it illegal to block ads and modify webpages locally <…> I don't even see how that could be enforced.

Say, modifying page source acquires questionable legal status (like port scanning or jailbreaking) and is removed from every major browser. Sadly, to me personally this doesn't seem too unlikely to happen in near future.

wreegab3• 12 years ago

Blocking ads is such a dick move. This should be made illegal.

A law to enforce one very specific business model is a terrible idea.

If only I could tip $2 the author for that video I watched and liked (like say, 10,000 other viewers) with as little overhead as possible... No donations, no subscriptions, just a tip with no further obligations. You think ad brokers would welcome this business model?

takeda• 12 years ago

You probably were implying this, but just in case you didn't, this might actually be quite possible right now through crypto currency.

nathan_long2• 12 years ago

You are not entitled to change a website to your contempt and cut their main revenue source.

You are not entitled to require my HTTP agent to request assets I do not desire. I GET your HTML and I request the additional files I want. I override your CSS with user stylesheets if I'm colorblind or I just like seeing ponies in the background. I write my own custom JS to run with your page if I want. I'm a free user of the web, and you're operating under the wrong paradigm. Heck, even newspaper readers are entitled to use scissors.

If you don't want to serve content to the general public, use a paywall.

bowlofpetunias2• 12 years ago

Adblock Plus is malware. Period.

Besides blackmailing advertisers into whitelisting their ads for money, last year it added a "typo correction" feature that would intercept "mistyped" url's and redirect you to the correct one.

Except it blatantly redirected existing domains to that of competitors, and added referrer affiliate ID's to the URL so Palant could cash in.

Despite claims to the contrary, that "feature" was initially on by default. That is pure malware, it has nothing to do with blocking ads.

Palant is someone who's words should not be trusted. He's basically a successful malware blackmailer.

forgotAgain• 12 years ago

Since Chrome added "click to play" in plug-in settings I haven't used an ad blocker. With Flash ads no longer playing, my need for the blocker went away.

The changeover to canvas ads is happening quickly and that may bring back my need.

When I don't want to be tracked I rely on incognito mode.

gorhill4• 12 years ago

I see Wladimir Palant has again commented on µBlock in his comment section [1]:

clear tendency to trade performance for memory use

This has been a pattern with Wladimir Palant with regard to my work. Outright misrepresentation [2], or criticism through vague statements while never specific enough to understand what part of the code he is referring to.

Nowhere in the code did I trade memory for CPU, both have always been of highest concern. Given that my benchmarks show µBlock does significantly better than ABP on both memory and CPU count, vaguely stating that "clear tendency to trade performance for memory use" is just plain nonsense. [3]

I did ask him to be specific about his statement regarding how I implemented element hiding without injecting gigantic CSS stylesheet in every page and frame, but never received a response, and it is understandable why: he was misrepresenting. [4]

[1] https://palant.de/2014/07/29/which-is-better-adblock-or-adbl...

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Adblock-Plus... (bottom of the page)

[3] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...

[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c39

Edit: added reference to CPU/mem benchmarks

e15ctr0n• 12 years ago

AdBlock Plus also increases the amount of memory used by Firefox, to the order of 60–70 MiB + about 4 MiB per iframe.

https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

ksec• 12 years ago

Are there any other reason to use Ad Block software other then privacy and speed of surfing the internet?

cubbage• 12 years ago

Gabriel from AdBlock here.

Here is AdBlock's response to Wladimir's post: http://blog.getadblock.com/2014/07/adblock-and-privacy.html

Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

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