My current views on Firefox adblocker addons

February 15, 2015

I normally do my web browsing through a filtering proxy that strips out many ads and other bad stuff, and on top of that I use NoScript so basically all JavaScript based things drop out. However this proxy only does http, so I've known for a while that as the web moved more and more to https my current anti-ad solution would be less and less effective. This led to me playing around with various options in my testing browser but never pushed me to putting anything in my main browser. What pushed me over the edge to do this relatively recently was reaching my tolerance limit for Youtube ads and discovering that AdBlock Plus would reliably block them. Adding ABP made YouTube a drastically nicer experience for me; I consider its additional ad-blocking features to basically be a nice side effect.

(The popup ads are only slightly irritating, but then YT started feeding me more and more long, unskippable ads. At that point it was either stop watching YT videos or do something about it.)

What makes a bunch of people twitchy about AdBlock Plus is that it's run by a company plus their business model of allowing some ads through. Although ABP is open source, this means that its development is subject to changes in business model and we've seen that cause problems before. Eventually various things made me uncomfortable and unhappy enough to switch to AdBlock Edge (also), which is a fork of ABP with a bunch of things removed. In my 'basically use the defaults' setup, AdBlock Edge works the same as AdBlock Plus. It certainly removes the YouTube ads, which is what I really care about right now.

(My honest opinion is that AdBlock Plus is probably not going to go bad, partly because a fair number of people are paying attention to it since it's a quite popular Firefox extension. Still, I feel a bit better with AdBlock Edge, perhaps because I've been burned by changing extension business models before.)

Both AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Edge don't appear to have made my Firefox either particularly slow or particularly memory consuming. It's possible that I simply haven't noticed the impact because it's mild enough to not be visible for me, especially given my already filtered non-JavaScript browser environment. People certainly do report that these extensions cause them problems.

Recently µBlock has been in the information sources that I follow, so I gave it a try. Sadly, the results for me aren't positive in that µBlock did nothing to stop YouTube ads. Since this is the most important thing for me, I'm willing to forgive ABP and ABE a certain amount of resource consumption in order to get it. I do like the general µBlock pitch of being leaner and more efficient, so someday I hope it picks up this ability.

(As far as I know there's nothing else that blocks YouTube ads. I'd obviously be happy with a standalone extension for this plus µBlock for general blocking, but as far as I know no such thing exists.)

PS: I use other technology to block the scourge of YouTube autoplay. It's possible that this pile of hacks is interacting badly with µBlock.


Comments on this page:

By sdh at 2015-02-15 07:12:32:

Hi. uBlock blocks all youtube ads for me. I guess you do not have the right filters enabled?

By Albert at 2015-02-15 08:45:18:

Ghostery works fine for me, and I use it together with adblock. I see no YT ads whatsoever.

https://www.ghostery.com/en/download

Another option is to use CSS to block ads:

I use this (plus disabling plug-ins, which takes care of the Flash stuff). If there is a site that needs that needs Flash (which is more and more rare), it's very quick and easy to toggle on Safari (⌘, -> Security -> Allow plug-ins).

I also surf with cookies completely disabled, except for those sites that I need to log into. (Again, very to toggle under Safari.)

Just remembered: another solution that I use for some hosts (like MacKeeper) is a hosts(5) that gives back 127.0.0.1 for certain entries.

Someone had/does keep a long lists of ad sites:

Haven't used it myself.

FWIW: I don’t expect people who aren’t like me to experience the sort of problems with the AdBlocks as I have – where by “like me” I mean “hundreds of open tabs”. (Currently I stand at ~500. I’ve been to well over 700.) If your tab usage resembles a normal, sane person more than it resembles me, then the added resource drain from using one of the AdBlocks is not likely to be noticeable.

In fact, I myself have had the opposite experience when my tab usage hadn’t yet grown to my current levels of crazy. I figure that other other changes in the software involved must be primarily responsible for the change in outcomes, but still.

By Tilman Baumann at 2015-02-16 07:53:35:

I find Ghostery pretty spectacular. Because honestly, my main concern with ads (despite being a security issue and incredibly annoying) is that they track you everywhere. Ghostery solves that problem on a more fundamental level. It blocks all tracking code. Ads without tracking does not exist, that is why you don't see them too. You would be shocked how many individual organisations track you practically everywhere you go!

PS: I admit, I use Ghostery and µBlock together. But Ghostery on it's own would do most of the work.

By God at 2015-05-10 13:27:47:

You seem to have Flash installed. That means you are a crazy person. [themoreyouknow.png goes here]

By cks at 2015-05-10 15:43:37:

Flash used to be essential for Youtube and a few other sites I use, which I do care about, but that's probably less and less true these days. I do sometimes get tempted to remove Flash and see what would happen, but on the other hand my setup does work now and my Youtube problems would be pretty much just the same without Flash.

Written on 15 February 2015.
« Planning ahead in documentation: kind of a war story
Web ads considered as a security exposure »

Page tools: View Source, View Normal, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Sun Feb 15 03:01:30 2015
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.