Stupidly, I clicked on the first link, which was a Google ad for Chrome bundled with some malware.
Spent the next few hours getting rid of said malware.
I've used adblock (ublock) for a long time, but there was always a little bit of guilt associated with it; that episode cleared the guilt, completely and for ever.
I have a certain addiction I cannot control. Tried everything possible without any success at all. It's not as dangerous as drugs, but it's also related to buying a lot of expensive stuff. So, when I disable adblock, every website spams the hell out of me with ads related to my addiction.
This is nasty! And disgusting. I'm sure I'm not alone. Also there's probably a huge number of people that get influenced to smaller extent and don't pay attention to it (because it doesn't ruin their lives, y'know).
will remove ads in the youtube app if you have a rooted device, just install the xposed framework, then this.
Keep in mind you need to update it when the youtube app updates (youtube app might be showing ads, or behaving weirdly/crashing if you don't)
As such, the pricing structure, while maybe overcomplicated, is perfectly fair. Theoretically, in an ad-free world, this is the price you would need to pay to consume the same content. If you feel it is too high, then what you're saying is that, for you, ads are worth the annoyance. (Or, alternately, you're saying that you'd rather pay less and get lower-quality content.)
Personally, I think $10/month is an extremely reasonable price to pay for the web content I consume, and I'd certainly rather pay it than see the ads.
EDIT: That said, as a matter of product design, I think this pricing structure sucks. They really ought to offer a flat price that removes all ads. However, I suspect that would require strong-arming all AdSense sites to agree to new terms (since it would affect how much those sites are getting paid), and as we've seen when YouTube did this in order to create YouTube Red, it tends to create a huge PR backlash.
Firefox with uBlock. Just plain old FF extensions. No root required.
Firefox for Android is seriously underrated IMO.
But i came back to firefox recently and now it is my default. The "Reading list" feature is so good productivity-wise.
And using firefox again made me realize that features like Reading-list, Tracking-protection, or even offline-mode would never be implemented in Chrome because of the fundamental conflict of interest between its users and Google
The ad blocker is also open source: https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast
Ah yes, I'm remembering why I hate non-Nexus Android phones...