Not OP, but I live without adblock. In Chrome, I disable Javascript on all sites by default. Rarely do I need to unblock a new site. I have a paid subscription to the Washington Post (which grants access to articles, but doesn't actually hide the ads...), and the ads on other sites I visit aren't too oppressive.

More than anything else, over nearly twenty years on the Internet I've developed the mental reflex to "tune out" and automatically ignore any Internet ad, anywhere, unless it's literally shoved in my face to the exclusion of all other content.

I've previously used adblock extensions, but my reasons for going without mirror the link author's. I simply can't trust Google/Chrome not to autoinstall a new, broken, malware-infested version of my favorite extension. I don't feel I should have to mess with directory permissions or application sandboxing in order to achieve some half-measure of extension security, so instead I eschew them completely.

Host blocking at the OS level. No need for extensions.

I adblock then disable extension updates. The only extension I add.

you can do it quite effectively outside the browser using a host block[1] list or pi-hole. my uBlock now only fires sporadically for cases I don't catch with the /etc/hosts approach (e.g. disallowing e.g. remote fonts)

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Install the version from Github instead of the store, and you can avoid the problem. Instructions for Chrome/Firefox here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/dist/README.md

Other browsers see the overview here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md#chro...

Yes, but I have JS disabled on most sites. Regarding adblock, there were posts that it slows the browser down, injects huge CSS rules into every iframe etc.

It's pretty easy going without adblock. There are a lot of websites without obtrusive ads and it's pretty easy to start to recognize which sites I just don't want to go to anymore.