That's only if people agree with your ideology. Instead of making blanket statements which are inherently subjective, just explain why you prefer Adblock Plus.
Personally, I vastly prefer Adblock Plus. I have no ideological objection to advertising or tracking in general, I just don't want intrusive ads. ABP does an excellent job of filtering out intrusive ads while still allowing me to support the sites I like where advertising is minimal.
I love the ad-supported web and strongly disagree with the notion that it's against users' interests. Getting free content and services in a competitive marketplace without switching costs is invaluable.
Have a look at performance comparison between the two, ublock origin offers better speed with memory footprint a third of ABP while blocking more a.k.a. saner defaults.
I don't care if ABP offers some mafia like option to deal with advertisers, I do care that my box stay snappy with memory available when I open 150+ tabs in my browser i.e. a regular day.
Whenever ABP offers the same level of performances than ublock origin then I may base my choice on ideology, but the required rewrite doesn't seems to be on ABP roadmap.
You don't even have to do that. It behaves exactly the same as ABP if you use the same filter lists. It's just also happens to be more efficient than ABP.
That's not to say AdBlock Plus does a great job (I don't know) but some people think collective bargaining is a good thing.
For more read about countervailing power.
He mentioned that uBlock can use the same "reasonable" filter list as ABP, it's just better to use uBlock since it's more efficient.
We have very different opinions, because I don't see it as a bargaining situation. The reasonable and acceptable level of spam, web advertising, malware, and user tracking is zero. I won't accept any more than that because (very near) zero is easily achieved using the currently available tools.
Given that you put advertising in there with the other items, I assume this means that you pay for all websites that you block ads on? Because it seems to me that your model is "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else".
No, that's putting the cart in front of the horse. The World Wide Web was built for users by users, not for publishers by publishers. It's nice that publishers, who are themselves users, can make use of it. Good for them. If they can support themselves, even better.
However, any user has the moral right to filter any content delivered to them, as he or she sees fit. If publishers don't like that, they can build their own Internet instead of using ours, the users', Internet.
In fact, I would say it is a moral obligation for any Internet user to oppose any content-provider that attempts to put undue technical restraints on their content under threat of not publishing that content at all.
Interstate highways were created in the same manor. That is fun reading if you research it a bit.
We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
> We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
It's not really a moral issue. There's a moral obligation to spend 2 minutes trying to punch the monkey or whatever ridiculous thing they're doing now? Give me a break.
The rest of that doesn't hold water, either. People will pay straight away for quality content. The pre-internet movie, music, and publishing industries are proof of it. Quality content will survive because if people have to pay for it they will.
There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
> Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
If a company has private data publicly accessible to the internet then the moral thing to do would be to tell them so that they can fix it, not for everybody to close their eyes and pretend there's not a problem.
Good thing that that isn't what I said.
> People will pay straight away for quality content.
No, no they won't. The fact that you had to say 'pre-internet' proves that the convenience factor is significant. People paid for movies because that was the only way to get movies. To claim that paid-for movies were therefore 'quality' is arse-backwards.
> Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
That's fine. You're not the one claiming it's moral what you do (that was another user that I was responding to). I'm also of the opinion that your model is the "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else" model.
I'm midway on this myself, by the way. I use NoScript and no ad-blocker. Plain ads get through, but obnoxious ads don't (like the ones that cover text while you're reading). What I don't pretend, however, is that I'm choosing some sort of moral path in doing this.
> private data
My comment on private data was just an illustration that just because you can access something online, doesn't mean it's moral to do whatever you want with it. Another example of such is revenge porn.
> There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
Advertisement funds listicles and clickbait in a vicious cycle.
That is the kind of content that can only exist because of Internet advertising. That is the kind of content you "pay" for with your attention-span.
Investigative journalism is being actively replaced by clickbait, listicles and bullshit because Internet advertisements are so much more profitable. Because you don't need to be good any more, you just need to hack weak minds on scale.
THAT is the kind of Internet you're arguing I should support by not blocking advertising.
Actual quality content has so many ways of monetizing itself (online and offline) it's disingenuous to ignore. Just not this one. Real life dead tree newspapers also take a dive in quality when they go down the hole of cheap shitty advertising.
It will always lose against the low quality fire hose swamp of shit content because it's just as profitable (often more) and so much cheaper to produce. That is why people have been blocking Internet ads since forever. The ad-companies themselves are often shady, parasites come automatically with the territory.
I'm blocking ads until that shit goes out of business. Not because "fuck everyone else" but because "fuck everyone that supports it".
They were "quality" in the sense that people willingly paid for them. The sad reality is that a huge amount of web content doesn't even meet that low bar.
And I said "pre-internet" mainly to avoid the issue of piracy from bit-torrent, but it probably wasn't necessary. A ton of movies here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...) were made post-internet and they still made hundreds of millions of dollars. Likewise, the music industry is doing great.
The news industry is in the dumps because they were the ones stupid enough to devalue their content by giving it away for free on the web along side trashy advertising.
A URL is just an advertisement for a resource which is available on the web. Since when does seeing an advertisement obligate you to go acquire the object being advertised? Must I compensate the makers of highway billboards for the work they did presenting those advertisements, if I happen not to want to purchase their products?
No, it doesn't work like that. Web publishers can hope all they want that I choose to accept their invitations to download ads and look at them, but it's my machine and I'm paying for my own bandwidth, so I'll make my own choices about what to do with it. An adblocker is nothing more than an intelligent assistant for making those choices.
And FWIW I do pay for or donate to several online services that I use often and that provide real value for me. At the same time, it's very unlikely that I'll ever pay to read somebody's blog, twitter, facebook, personal website, etc.
But I'm curious why you wouldn't put web advertising in with spam, tracking, and malware? They're all heavily entwined, AFAICT.
Some have already transitioned to crowdfunding (see patreon, the dice tower getting funded on kickstarter,...) micropayment, subscriptions.
But this case of "your failed business model is not my problem" is not to blame on adblockers alone but also on dwindling ads revenue among others reasons due to facebook driving prices down. When facebook investor story time will come to an end the whole web advertising ecosystem might crumble on itself.
The day the usual website will receive 12 to 20Billions views a month and occupy 10TB of disk space, then we could use wikipedia as a representative example. Until then wikipedia should not be used as an example of how well the usual ad-supported website would fare with an alternative revenue model.
IINM wikipedia has chosen a business model not based on ads which successfully funds the project for about 10+ years.
Yes, that was my point — Wikipedia is probably the absolute best-case scenario for a free website that isn't supported by ads, and they're still panhandling. The usual ad-supported website would fare much, much worse, and would probably just stop providing its service to the world.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports#Fun...
If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss.
If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between different search engines to find the right one for a given query. If I need a subscription, then it would much more firmly entrench the dominant player.
People spend a lot of time railing against advertising without considering how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years.
> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years
... wait are you trolling?
Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?
Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.
[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.
I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".
In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.
They might have the money but why should they give it away? They are not a charity.
> it would make room for better search engines to emerge
How would those search engines fund themselves? what would their business model be?
But they only have this money because of AdWords. That means that, in this world, Google would still exist, but no-one could come enter the search space to compete with it—and surely that's not a desireable outcome.
How they reconcile this with the name "AdBlock" I'll never know.
or maybe adsellads [1]
[1]:http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus-now-...
I use uBlock. But I approve of the existence and success of ABP and similar.
People differ.
uBlock requires you to do this explicitly for each site you want to support through ad revenue. I suspect most novice users will never do this.
ABP is now using their user base as leverage to extract payment from some sites to show ads by default. I don't think that is a good idea at first blush, but there may be arguments for the practice I haven't considered.
I'd much rather outsource the work of whitelisting to ABP than having to do an individual consideration on every single site I visit.
There's also the fact that I never want to see malicious/intrusive advertising. If I maintain my own whitelists, I have to experiment site by site. If I use ABP, they do that experimentation and enforcement for me.
The thing that totally frustrates me is how many people in this thread seem to be totally incapable of grasping that ABP in fact offers exactly what I want: someone blocking intrusive advertising, but not all advertising, with me having to do zero work. As a bonus, there's even a business model attached (so they're less likely to randomly sell out their install base to a malware provider).
Those niche blogs could choose to pay for their hosting and it costs less than 10$ a month ($5.99 or $8.25 at wordpress.com[1])
If the advertising based business model failed overnight, I highly doubt finding 75 to 100$ a year to stay online would be out of reach.
You do know that about 10% of the advertisers get in the whitelist by paying instead of conforming to the acceptable ads program ? You probably know that the acceptable ads is very limited in scope and most non intrusive ads never get whitelisted but surely you know that adblock plus has now evolved into an ad selling platform.
It seems to me that adblock plus does not fit your stated ideological stance as well as Brave[3] does. You should consider ditching ABP and using Brave instead which blocks tracking and replaces all ads by other non-intrusive ads and also offers and option to pay websites directly so you could contribute to the hosting fee of those niche blogs.
[1]: https://wordpress.com/pricing/ [2]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus-now-... [3]: https://www.brave.com/
I suspect most novice users will never install uBlock, because the article they read in <whatever> will mention ABP. :)
It just depends on what makes sense for the individual, a default whitelist because you want to support some advertising (that is, if you thought about it at all), or default black everything.
That is, I do not believe that other solutions have a very clear way for advertisers to determine what is and isn't acceptable; for the sake of argument, this puts aside the fact that some unacceptable aspects of ads should be common sense (loud noises, pop-unders, fake download links, etc). Basically when an adblocking user reaches the site, they have no means of communicating why they dislike the ads on that site - most of the time, it's just a blanket block that users never think about. So even if you really like a website and would love to support it through the ad revenue, your current options don't send a very clear signal as to what was disruptive and dislikable.
Again, I'm not saying I fully agree with this, but I think it's an argument that has some value, and reflects the greater difficulty with advertising in general; it's a one-way communication venue, and the few times that we as viewers are able to get a signal back to the other side, it's usually ignored until legislation gets involved. (See the CALM Act and it's overall ineffectiveness [1]) Basically there isn't really much control over what advertisers actually do, and even Truth in Advertising laws basically have no teeth except for extremely blatant falsehoods.
Adblocking is the first major way that viewers have been able to push back against advertising, and I'm with that 100% since I just think it's pointless in and of itself - it's wasteful in my opinion how much infrastructure exists out there just for the sake of providing advertisements. But I also understand that likely advertising isn't going away, so having some method to signal back clearly and directly to advertisers what is wrong with an ad is good in my mind. Said signal having some teeth to make sure they get the message is also important, else it's not much better than before. But not giving any indication as to what's wrong doesn't really help either. (I'm not blaming anyone but stubborn advertisers here, but I think it helps us as activists if we can make it 100% what we don't like about specific advertisements instead of just doing a blanket block).
IMHO you choose yourself the websites you want to whitelist, this way you can give away your privacy for fraction of pennies to the websites you choose to support. What if you want to support a controversial website that has been banned from most conventional advertising networks (for example the piratebay) ?
Then again the trade off between permanent own privacy loss for fraction of pennies make no sense to me.
That's another reason ublock origins is far superior to ABP: it blocks tracking by default. Of you can configure each one to mimick the other but users seldom change the defaults hence the 75% of german users subscribed to ABP acceptable ads program, (ratio is higher than usual because adblock are mostly used by tech savvy and privacy concerned users).
Then again you can't make ABP uses a third of the resources it uses so you would have to find a way to make ublock origins use three times more resources to make it work exactly as ABP.
Do you really not see how thinking "tracking" is evil is an inherently ideological statement?
I do not care if Google tracks literally everything I do online. I don't consider it evil and in fact willingly opt-in to tracking.
Let me rephrase that differently: as a matter of fact privacy is a requirement for freedom. Tracking by definition destroys (or at the very least entails) privacy, thus effectively preventing freedom from emerging.
Then it is a matter of personal preferences. Personal preferences may differ on the desirability of freedom of self or others. It is said that those who care for freedom will act in a way providing freedom for everyone, the others others will act selfishly and enjoy the freedom provided by those who care.
Though it should be noted that ABP and UBO are two completely different things. ABP is an adblocker, it aims at making money filtering and selling ads. UBO is a general-purpose blocker, its main goal is to help users neutralize the privacy-invading apparatus of which the visible part is ads. That's why UBO features options to block webrtc, remote font, link prefetch, hyperlink auditing and beacon while ABP has none of this but features acceptable ads.
From the advertisers' perspective it's a shakedown. From the users' perspective it's a betrayal of trust. What's not to like? /s
I was also in favor of that... until I noticed that the google ads[1] were links to malware and adware sites at times.
Now, I just block everything without distinction. And I make sure it's the same for every setup (i.e. rest of the family and friends who are not tech savy).
[1] AdBlock Plus unblocked adds from google after they started paying them. They introduced an opt-in button to "block non intrusive adds".
Basically ads that exploit you without you clicking on them. I don't know if it was on the acceptable ads list and you had a old copy of adobe acrobat, then you would be hacked. They didn't mention what sites but users in Central Europe got it on popular websites. Sites you'd probably trust.
Other than static ads between the hosting site and the site that wants to advertise without a middleman ad network, I don't trust any ads. In the case listed previously, a human is more likely to review the ad, making it safer.
Since I care about not getting hacked, the obvious conclusion for me is to block all ads.
Herein lies the problem
They key was the hex encoding of the hash of the contents. f4/c0/34/ad/91/... Notice the ad
I was QAing for a company. They had a link in an email go through a tracker as opposed to loading the tracker on another site. Obviously uBlock blocked it and confused me for a few minutes until I realized what it was blocking.
They didn't like my suggestion to have the tracker be loaded externally so if it was blocked, no big deal.
I've heard of uBlock and I continue to use ABP, so I guess your theory falls flat. :)
Theory does not hold.
So you have zero disadvantages, but one advantage. As a result, it’s strictly superior.
While I admit that ublock is faster, Adblock plus has much better integration and looks better. When it's installed it presents me with very few options and I'm basically good to go without changing and settings.
Additionally I use umatrix which covers and options abp does not,which helps abps speed to almost not matter anymore.
Lastly I would add that the latencies I've measured to be caused by Adblock plus fall almost into the region of "doesn't matter". What little benefit ublock has given me the Times I've tested it was barely worth it.
Purely by "it's faster" you should probably be using ed over any other editor right now since ed is objectively faster than any other POSIX editor. Or pretty much most editors.
>strictly
I'd refrain from using absolutes when making statements about personal opinion. It makes you look like a fool.
>no advantages
As stated earlier, abp has much better integration. It's one advantage vs one advantage.
Seems like personal choice to me.
you realize running abp on top of umatrix is completely redundant, right?
I utilize uMatrix to block unwanted scripts on websites, like some trackers that ABP doesn't catch.
I find uMatrix' AdBlocking potential to be rather lacking, I rely on ABP for that.
They work in perfect harmony.
or use focus[1] instead of safari, it's what's recommended on the "block ads" website[2].
[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/focus-by-firefox-content-blo... [2]: https://blockads.fivefilters.org/
[0]: https://pi-hole.net
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579?mt=8
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/admosphere-free-ad-blocker/i...
[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-privacy-browse...
That said, there's now ublock origin for Safari which is what I use.
* lower power/memory use and greater battery life vs. Chrome or Mozilla
* being written by a hardware company vs. a surveillance company
Naive to put trust in either companies use of your details
This has not been my experience, but maybe that's just because I use an ancient text editor (Emacs). If my several-year-old computer with 8GB of RAM goes into a paging frenzy, the browser is usually at fault. Emacs may be using a few hundred megabytes at most.
As for privacy concerns, it's your call. Apple sells expensive hardware; Google sells surveillance-based advertising; Mozilla... sells its search box to either Google or Microsoft? I've made my uneasy peace with this choice.
This is almost never actually the case. In reality, better performance tends to mean better battery due to improved usage of resources.
Not a single category other than energy consumption does Safari benchmark near Chrome, Firefox or even Edge http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-browser-internet...
Any of you are free to offer actual data proving otherwise
Finally, while Chrome definitely has a better html5 compliance, there's one thing I hate about Chrome. It doesn't keep the state of the previous page when using the back button unlike Firefox, Safari and IE. See this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2879
The browser is 100% my main energy drain when I'm developing. Sublime Text barely takes up any of my power or memory.
Additionally, I don't use a single website where I noticed a performance hit when I switched from Chrome to Safari.
Reader button
Scrolling performance
Most Mac-like UI
Privacy focus
Memory use and battery life
Although for those people I usually recommend Adguard, not Adblock plus.
[1]: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...
Opt-in > Opt-out
As another poster said 'defaults matter'. If you want a representative sample of usage then "opt-in" taints your data. I would argue that there is nothing wrong with correctly anonymised, aggregated, opt-in tracking. I want most websites to track my usage and I hope they use the data to make their site better. Any time I don't want to be tracked I can switch to incognito.
However - there are many issues around data-sharing between 3rd parties and deanonymising techniques. It's also fairly hard to trust that companies stick to their word so I'm not entirely complacent.
Develop in what sense? uBlock origin is at least 10% better than ABP just by not doing that.
The _only_ thing people want from such a program is to block all ads and trackers. That's it. That's the feature list. You decide to compromise the single goal to fund further "development"? How does that make any sense?
That's if 1. you stayed opted into the acceptable ads program when you used ABP and 2. you consider all ads equally bad and harmful.
I didn't and I don't, and I happen to agree with GP. I use ublock, but I found a constant stream of false positives and false negatives. The worst is with popups actually; a torrenting website I used to visit started doing "on page click" popups and ublock doesn't block those; ABP does.
I hate TV ads and never watch TV as i find the ads intrusive. But taking the minor rewards from content creators that my presence can bring - when I'm benefiting from their content and cost them server resources - seems pretty unfair to me.
Here's your reason for populism and the disappearance of good journalism: no one is willing to pay or be even in the slightest inconvenienced.
I don't give a single hoot about tracking and want quality ads. Do I not exist?
Sure, people have all sorts of weird fetishes.
Id prefer a tiny payment option - €5- 10 a year would give any news publisher more gain from having me as a user than bombarding me with ads (just the same way it works for Wikipedia) - but that option in most cases doesn't seem to exist. Or the flattr option to directly reward qualitative reporting and recreate good incentives (quality over clickbait).
Nope, I said zero things about ideology. All I said was this: an AdBlock program is a program that block ads. That's what is reasonable to expect: that it does what it says in the tin. If an AdBlock program starts charging money to allow certain ads to go through, then it is betraying its users.
Some people want a program that filters ads according to some criteria of quality? Sure, I don't care. But it's not an ad blocker anymore, it's an ad filter. Right?
The only ideology in this discussion is coming from people who argue that the public has some obligation to accept ads or tracking in exchange for free content. I made no moral judgements, I just have a strong personal preference against ads and tracking, a lot of other people in my "box" or whatever the fuck it is do too, and this is why ad blockers became popular.
And let's be honest: people who claim to like to be exposed to "high-quality ads" typically have some vested interest in the ad business.
And the leverage by its users who do not get paid them. IIRC ABP gets paid around a third of the advertising revenue from whitelisting the advertiser if it reaches 10m impressions, so the more users seeing ads ABP has, the more money they make.
Except, the acceptable ads list for larger companies can only be modified by Eyeo, and they only do it after being paid. It’s a racket.
[1]: https://gigaom.com/2015/09/30/adblock-plus-list-of-acceptabl...
ABP still is "evaluating" that, and currently has a beta where acceptable ads are handled by an ad network as intermediate, which validates the quality of your ad, and handles payment to get it whitelisted.
Otherwise, it is impossible: the blacklist are the same, the capabilities are the same, the only difference being that ABP will allow some ads by design.
I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm failing to consider, but I've generally found "opt-out by default" to be highly hostile to users. e.g. In the US you're only allowed to digitally opt-out of credit card prescreening [1] for five years unless you're willing to mail something out. This considerably raises the burden on the user, even though I'd conjecture most people are not interested in receiving this kind of mail, and they'd largely consider it spam. I make a point of blacklisting any service that mails me spam, and I encourage others to do the same.
Additionally, I'm also opposed to ads because I've found they're generally against the user's best interests. Humans are more important than companies.
[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
[1] https://www.optoutprescreen.com/