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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

What is the best ad blocking plugin for Chrome nowadays?

If you feel up to it, I still personally recommend a hosts file. Extremely low overhead, and it blocks all forms of malicious content from ad endpoints.

I use: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Whoa, that's intense. Definitely going to try this out when my new laptop arrives! Thanks!

I've found some content won't appear/work if ads are blocked. So in some cases I temporarily whitelist a site in AdBlock or Ghostery. With a HOSTS file, isn't that sort of thing a lot more painful?

(I used to use the HOSTS method but stopped for that reason.)

This has yet to affect me to the point of me actually noticing that anything was broken. The worst I'll see is a lot of extraneous whitespace on a webpage where an ad would have been.

That said, frankly, if a web site won't work properly because it can't load content from an ad network, then it's probably not a site I'd want to visit and pull information from.

I've been using a different one (http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt), which is roughly the same size. However, their entries seem quite different (only 1921 common domains out of 11356+13586 total). Maybe they should be merged.

It would be very interesting to perform an analysis of the differences and merge them, I agree.

They work well, but the only problem is I've found is they can have a lot of false-positives.

Stuff like redirects that sites use to track links can get blocked and you can't follow links on a page, etc.

I recommend you check out StevenBlack's Amalgamated hosts file: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

  Currently the hosts files from the following locations are amalgamated:
    MVPs.org Hosts file at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm, updated monthly, or thereabouts.
    Dan Pollock at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ updated regularly.
    Malware Domain List at http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/, updated regularly.
    Peter Lowe at http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/, updated regularly.
    hpHosts at http://hosts-file.net/, updated regularly
    My own small list in raw form here.

I suppose "best" is subjective, but I'm using "uBlock Origin", "Flashcontrol", and "HTTPS Everywhere" together and am satisfied.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashcontrol/mfidm...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/https-everywhere/g...

Is there a reason for using flashcontrol over simply setting the plugin to click to play?

Wasn't aware that was built into Chrome until just now. I'll give that a try and see if my experience is the same. Thanks.

I tried the native implementation for a day, but found that it doesn't handle enabling content selectively as gracefully as the extension.

Cheers!

I use uBlock Origin and Ghostery.

Does uBlock have a mechanism for allowing non-intrusive ads in?

I resisted ad-blockers for years because I believe in giving up my eyeballs to ads for free content, but finally gave up when my son started downloading minecraft mods, and he'd have trouble discerning between real download links and ads which installed malware. So I really don't mind some basic advertising, I just don't want (subjectively) "obnoxious" ads (and, yeah, the subjective part makes it hard).

I see that uBlock allows you to configure lists - are there lists that only contain the worst violators? (Forgive my ignorance, as I said I'm new to ad-blockers as I resisted for so long).

uBlock's creator has a pretty strong stance against premade whitelists from what I've seen (the original version is currently called 'UblockOrigin' by gorhil), so there's no default allow function. You can of course allow ads for specific sites by clicking on the icon and then clicking the power button.

I've found ublock to be the best for both chrome and firefox. Take up much less cpu than adblockplus.

uBlock Origin

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