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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Several popular Firefox privacy/security add-ons have become much worse in the last year. BlockSite added ads and full tracking of user browsing. (That one is really bad.) AdBlock Plus added a "whitelist" of ads they let through. (The advertisers pay AdBlock)

Firefox itself reports installed add-ons to Mozilla AMO each day for tracking and update purposes. Add-ons don't need to check for updates themselves.

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Is this there an open source alternative to Adblock plus?

uBlock is getting popular fast, but note AdBlock Plus itself is also open source.

I didn't realize that. I'm going to check out the source to see just which sites that are whitelisting

It's not in the source code, but instead in a subscription that ABP uses by default (it remembers if you unchecked "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" so it doesn't re-enable this list on every update): https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

This is the subscription, which was originally linked from that page (but it now links to the Acceptable Ads subforum, which has a sticky that links to this subscription): https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...

I don't know if disconnect.me is an exact alternative to AdBlock since I have never used AdBlock, but I like what it's doing and it's open source. https://disconnect.me/opensource

uBlock₀

uBlock Origin

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

AdBlock Plus is published under a GPLv3 license, so it is open source even if it doesn't have your preferred default settings. AdBlock Edge is a fork of AdBlock Plus that just disables the acceptable ads preference.

Personally, I don't use AdBlock Plus, but I think it is silly to criticize it for allowing some ads. Even in the first version it had a preference for allowing Google text ads -- the developers have always presented it as a tool for blocking annoying ads, not as a means for blocking all ads. That said, it is very easy to subscribe to another filter list in AdBlock Plus that blocks all ads.

Adblock Edge is a fork of Adblock Plus without the whitelisted ads, although I don't really see the point as the whitelist can be disabled from a simple checkbox in settings.

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