Its not as sexy a name, but I think ad blockers should be primarily described as tracking blockers. Its sounds as important as "anti-virus" and i think it could drive a few more people towards using them.
Can you be certain that this is true? Perhaps you didn't click through (I don't either), but what if your unconscious mind saw an ad that you did not register consciously.
The ad industry is just so damn broken that it's ripe for a huge disruption. The whole hypothesis of Google- that people will want to see ads centered on what they are searching for- seems to be erroneous. But it's been taken as gospel for what- a dozen years?- that everybody has piled on to the idea that we can know what people want to buy based on the type of information they seek. I think that except in explicit cases- searching for 'umbrellas that can withstand high winds' for instance- it's not true.
As I've said before here, when I'm ready to buy I'm searching Amazon, not Google.
It's probably more important than an antivirus for stopping malware.
Firefox + uBlock Origin is the right level of protection and you can get it on desktop and mobile (Android at least).
I've come across a few sites that were still using affiliate links and uO didn't block them. I'm not sure if uO has a policy of not blocking them but, to me, those are the only type of "acceptable ad" and CPU cycles shouldn't be wasted trying to detect and eliminate them.
Ad pushers have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted with our bandwidth and browser resources, they will always try to find the most insidious ways of inserting themselves into our lives, and try to track our every move, no matter how unwelcome they are.
Add to this the long history of malware using ad networks as an attack vector, and you have a very good case for simply blocking everything, in the name of privacy and security.
I hate ads, both for the above mentioned reasons, and because I find them extremely obnoxious (yes, even simple text ads), so I block everything with extreme prejudice. I am also on the "no mailed ads, ever" and the "you will be fined if you ever call this number with advertising" registries. My eyeballs, my attention, my PC, my OS, my browser, my home. Anything I don't trust and don't explicitly allow can just buzz off and leave me alone.
No, Firefox really does have tracking protection built-in:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/20/firefox-private-bro...