It works out of the box and blocks everything. Uses even less resources that any other alternative.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
I've heard this argument many times. I've used ABP for years and I don't remember ever seeing an ad (except on reddit, where I whitelist them).
Either the ads are so low key that I didn't see them, or they are very rare. Either way, I'm fine with it.
That doesn't stop other people from spreading FUD, though.
https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.txtBut google analytics, facebook, twitter, adclick, etc all track your activity across websites and to me should be at the top of any decent ad blocker.
Please keep denying the bleeding obvious (oh and they clearly have different effects on buying decisions)
Firefox, for example, used several different marketing avenues including a newspaper ad to try to make people aware of them. As far as I recall, that was all they were trying to do, let people know another browser option was out there. It seems a stretch to consider that as trying to manipulate your thinking.
That's completely opinionated ad and not just a notice that this product exists. I'm not going to stare at this stuff all day. You feel free.
People can buy gold (a month of "reddit premium") to thank others for their contributions. In October 2013, they launched the "reddit daily gold goal" bar that displays how much gold is needed every day to pay for all (server?) costs (http://www.redditblog.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html). I don't know if it includes other costs or just server costs actually. I've looked for some statistics over time to see whether the goal is being reached often or not but I can't find a graph.
They've got a couple other revenue sources like merchandising and their own advertisement system. But it would seem Reddit is not a massively profitable business at this point.
There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this. e.g. there was a front page post recently of a TacoBell sign that was 20 years old, a crap post with little value, but it ends up with +2000 votes and is front paged on a friday(i think). What do you think that sort of exposure is worth to Tacobell? If Tacobell did pay for some product placement of this nature do you think reddit would ever tell its users? Nope, that would pretty much kill any future attempt to do this sort of thing.
Whether the Tacobell payment is official or hidden by way of increased ad costs on other CondeNest properties or even if it is offered as a sort of add-on to their usual advertising in print media. Reddit is selling their front page one way or another becuase it is pretty much their cash cow, however milking it must be done very carefully because a user backlash would kill the site or future opportunities to monetise in this manner.
Maybe Taco Bell puts a lot of work in creating content that works well on the Reddit frontpage (which would definitely be manipulative, but hey, what are you gonna do), and maybe their own employees at home are upvoting it ("it's for the good of the company"), but I very much doubt the top people at Reddit are making a business out of this, if only because they couldn't justify it to their employees.
It just seems more likely to me that 1) a lot of material is organically upvoted, and it includes corporate stuff from well-known compagnies because a lot of people relate to them 2) some companies are (trying to) game the system in various ways that violate the spirit but not the letter 3) Reddit is trying to extract profit from all that but isn't being very aggressive about it because they don't have very high operating costs, are VC-backed and they'd rather find something that's compatible with the spirit of the platform and sustainable in the long run.
That's almost certainly false. Even if you believe the people running Reddit have no morals, the money from promoting Taco Bell can't possibly be close to enough to the legal and business risk to getting caught.
Source: My employer (a major site with Alexa rank <100) contacted ABP asking to have our text-only, clearly-delimited sponsored search results whitelisted. They told us that it wouldn't happen unless we signed an NDA, paid them a share of the revenue difference, and installed a third-party script on our site to allow them to track our users. (We just laughed at them and changed our markup to work around the block.)
I wonder if there would be interest in a real community driven whitelist. One without money involved or a dominant company applying it.
edit: This might work under the premises that there is (1) such a tool/list itself (2) a maintaining community and (3) a set of adblockers to support the list.
(1) is pretty simple. It's a list of ad-placements followed by a set of exclusion filters. This one needs to be transparently editable and commentable (both the ad-placement and the filter list edits)
(2) is a bet, I admit. I could imagine that if there is a serious interest in the allowance of unintrusive ads than this would be not a problem if enough reach is provided.
(3) is again an easy one. There are only so many adblockers out there. One key differentiator to ABP is that they don't allow ads on default. If that stays the same and the exception list is treated as an opt-in addition, I can only imagine benefits for those blockers. The only losing party is ABP since their overall impact might be reduced due to the lost of their monopoly. Since lists need to be transparent, their list could be used to start off and improve further maintainance.
Adguard has "acceptable ads" enabled by default.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-feature...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...
(I'd be more specific if I was using the dynamic filtering and understood it more clearly)
I used to be a big RequestPolicy believer, but single-page apps (which feels like saying "horseless carriages" in mid-2015) make it a lot of work. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw... is the best thing I've found if you're into granular control over sites. uBlock also has an ~"I'm an advanced user" option which will give you a little more blunt but still useful control over cross-site requests.
This is just a default whitelist that's trivial to remove. Yes, it's dumb, but it doesn't completely compromise NoScript if you're aware of the whitelist.
I'm not expecting it to block all javascript, or all malicious javascript. I'm just expecting it to block most or all of the annoying stuff on the web.
To the extent that this is the job it's being hired for, you don't really need to 'trust' it. You run it and it either does what you want or it doesn't. Personally it suits my needs perfectly.
That's my best recollection, I might have some details wrong. I believe Origin is the favored one right now.
Better use uBlock Origin, which is developed by the original uBlock author.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-uBlock-Ori...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-uBlock-Ori...
Source: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/
AdBlock Edge was a fork to precisely avoid this whitelist.
I only want to block obnoxious ads. First and foremost, popunder (these should not even exist, I don't see any legitimate use for them) and also popups. Let's add the very aggressive ones (blinking content).
I don't want to block the ads on my favorite blogs and I really don't like the fact that I have to create a custom rule to do so.
The issue I see mostly is that they actually sell access to the "acceptable ads" list. If it was just actually acceptable ads, it would have been okay, but mafia-like methods? that’s just morally inacceptable.
I find it works well for me with a minimum of fuss. I even got it to block those awful "Powered by Outbrain" clickbait links that have been showing up on news sites lately.