Which Is Better, Adblock Or Adblock Plus?

An anonymous reader writes: Wladimir Palant is the creator of the Adblock Plus browser extension, but he often gets asked how it compares to a similar extension for Chrome called Adblock. In the past, he's told people the two extensions achieve largely the same end, but in slightly different ways. However, recent changes to the Adblock project have him worried. "AdBlock covertly moved from an open development model towards hiding changes from its users. Users were neither informed about that decision nor the reasons behind it." He goes through the changelog and highlights some updates that call into question the integrity of Adblock. For example, from an update on June 6th: "Calling home functionality has been extended. It now sends user's locale in addition to the unique user ID, AdBlock version, operating system and whether Google Search ads are being allowed. Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com (or any other website if asked nicely) whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while — again, in addition to the unique user ID." Of course, Palant has skin in this game, and Adblock Plus has dealt with fallout from their "acceptable ads policy," but at least it's still developed in the open.

Comments

Re:Neither

[martin-boundary]

Such sites SHOULD go away. Here's a hint for website operators: Either give your stuff away for free no strings attached (we do it all the time with open source software - which is way more complex to do than a website), or hide your content using a membership. Ads are pollution, and have zero value.

I, and many other people, don't appreciate the implicit bait and switch where we are being lured into accessing a "free" website, but oh wait you now have to look at ads and we'll track what you do etc. It's dishonest.

If you're going to make free content available to all, then make it truly free. No ads. You'll have lots of people interested in seeing it. It's also fine to have a profit motive, nobody's forcing you to give stuff away if you don't want to, but if that's what you want to do, don't pretend it's free. Except you'll have fewer page views.

Some website operators are greedy, they want the "free" page views and they want the income at the same time. That's evil. Luckily there are plenty of people like me, who have well paying day jobs, and have no problem whatsoever to give away free software to help ordinary people deal with and filter that shit out.