I think I know what you're referring to, if you were using one of the unstable (beta, nightly, developer edition) channels with Firefox 57. There was a brief period I noticed during which the uBlock Origin WebExtension edition wasn't fully up to par with the old XUL-based version, letting some ads slip through. That's been fixed since then.

Though not a adblocker, Privacy Badger[0] works well as adblocker for me

[0] https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

uBlock origin with uMatrix

I use uBlock Origin plus uMatrix but I have to say that it's probably only for people who are really serious about security. It breaks nearly every site by default.

This really depends on the lists that you use in each. Research exactly what you want to block. I personally don't like a few of the lists for that specific reason, they block everything all together, not just tracking pixel domains and things of that nature. There is also an official uBlock Origin Extra extension that I find very handy for blocking websocket garbage. This is becoming more important as websocket connections become more prevalent. https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra/wiki/Sites-on-which-uBO...

uMatrix doesn't have any predefined lists though, you have to configure each site's matrix on first-visit, and it defaults to deny.

Does uMatrix really give a lot more security on top of uBlock Origin, in exchange for all the inconveniences?

I tried several times, but ended up sticking to a sandbox (firejail) + uBlock Origin + HTTPS Everywhere.

I wonder this, too. I use uBlock Origin in medium mode (advanced settings available, no third-party scripts or frames until enabled), and it seems to do what's needed. It breaks a lot of things, but also makes it easy to fix them.

You can just run uBlock in medium or hard mode...

On one of my laptops I downloaded a hosts file with a comprehensive list of advertising hostnames. This was to be able to browse with Edge back when it didn't have extensions and certain ads made it freeze. It was a bit of a pain because I had to go through the whole file to make sure there was nothing dodgy going on. But it did the trick.

I thought of making a script that updates that file automatically, but I can't say I've seen any ads on that laptop even without updating the file for months, so hasn't been my first priority.

AdBlock Plus was working well, until now, when they were forced to change the UI in 3.0 to be compatible with Firefox's new version. Now it is practically unusable.