Browser Advertisement blocking - yet another discussion

[Handruin]

I know we have a few older threads on this but I wanted to see what other people's thoughts are on the recent article of: AdBlock gobbled by 'mystery buyer ' - aka Adblock Plus. I'm going to remove ABP for the time being and give an alternative a try mostly out of curiosity. To clarify that at this moment that news article doesn't have me in panic to run away but I want to be prepared with understanding my options.

Adblock*
I found in reddit comments a bit of history on these plugins to help clarify what is going on with the Adblock variants.

A brief history of ad blockers that contain the name "adblock" (source link):

2002: Adblock (notice the lower case 'b') created by Henrik Aasted Sorensen.
2004ish: Adblock Plus by Michael McDonald. Based on Adblock.
2006: Adblock Plus transferred to Wladimir Palant.
2009: AdBlock (notice the uppercase 'B') by Michael Gundlach, the first ad blocker for Chrome. Unrelated to Adblock Plus.
2010: Adblock Plus by Wladimir Palant gets Chrome version.
2015: AdBlock by Michael Gundlach sold to unnamed buyer, possibly Adblock Plus.

uBlock (readme)
(uBlock Origin Firefox) and (uBlock Origin Chrome) with the source code available on GitHub here

Commenters seem to give the feedback that the better option to use now is uBlock Origin.

There is a history of what transpired between the original dev of uBlock and how uBlock Origin came to be in this thread of discussions surrounding the project.

TL;DR: (Source)

• gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of "my facebook isnt working plz help" issues.
• he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic's version back to himself).
• chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a "made with love by Chris" note.
• gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn't confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic's version).
• Google took down gorhill's extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
• gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.

 

[Stereodude]

I've switched a few computers to AdBlock Edge

 

[Handruin]

What are the pros of that over others you might have researched?

 

[Stereodude]

What are the pros of that over others you might have researched?

No idea. I didn't look into too many. It's basically a fork of ABP before the added non-intrusive ads.

Edit: I see it's since been discontinued, and they're recommending people use uBlock Origin.

 

[Tea]

Adblock Lattitude seems to work perfectly for me.

I do miss the wonderful old Opera though with it's two-click per-site Javascript blocking and the brilliant feature of specific per-domain ad-blocks. Simply right-click anywhere on a page, select "block content" and click on anything you don't like. You can select just that particular content or any content originating from the same domain with a single click, or (if you desire) hand-edit the block string for very fine-grained settings. Very simple, very effective. Best of all, you can leave unobtrusive ads as they are and only block an advertiser if the content is intrusive or offensive. Well-behaved agencies can continue to make a dollar for the website, bad ones (flash, movies, noise) get blocked - not just for that page but for all pages using ads from those same sources. Brilliantly simple and effective!

Edit: https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/privacy-and-security/adblock-latitude/

 

[ddrueding]

I'll stick with ABP until it does me wrong. Good to know there are alternatives out there. Thanks for doing the legwork folks!

 

[mubs]

I have AdBlock on my Chrome Browser. Yesterday I got a pop up from it saying I should allow ads from my favorite sites. I realized something had changed. I closed the pop up. Maybe I should un-install it and go with uBlock Origin. My Firefox install has uBlock; maybe I should switch that to uBlock Origin.

 

[Mercutio]

I use Adblock Latitude for my own needs. I advise others to run Adblock Plus because it is a single brand that is available regardless of one's choice of browser. However, I also have explicit directions for what blocking lists should be installed/enabled, because I think the acceptable ads list is bullshit.

The important trick is to search for "abp subs" and specifically add most of the entries at the bottom of the list, starting with Warning Removal. I'm glad to see that Fanboy's lists finally made it back on the official list. I have no idea why they were removed.