Ad-Blockers

Advertisements are a nuisance at best, and at their worst can be loud, obnoxious, or even contain malware. They can make webpages load slower. Many Internet users make use of ad-blockers, which are software that stop these ads from appearing. (Bilton, 2015) Ad-blockers do their job by finding tracking cookies and tracking scripts that insert ads into a webpage, and stop them from working. This makes a user's browsing a lot less stressful, since it removes a lot of content that they didn't want to see. However, for producers that make money off of advertisements, this can be detrimental, and has been the subject of debate. (Brad, 2015)

### Types

Simple ad-blockers do about what the name describes and little else. These blockers provide simple interfaces that make them easy to use and understand. Functionality these blockers provide includes blocking ads, allowing ads to appear when browsing the current webdomain, and to report a problem with the ad-blocker. Simple ad-blockers include Adblock Pro, Adguard, and Simply Block Ads. (Hal9000, 2017)

More common and easier to find are more advanced ad-blockers. These ad-blockers still block ads, but provide more options. Additional features include whitelisting certain webpages or domains, which will allow ads to appear on those whitelisted, blocking most ads but allowing ads that are non-obtrusive, such as banner ads, reporting ads that are still showing up on a page with the ad-blocker enabled, andshowing the user webpages that are running scripts on the page and allowing the user to decide whether they want these scripts to run. Ad-blockers in this category include Adblock, Adblock Plus, µBlock Origin, and Ghostery. (Hal9000, 2017)

Since Apple allowed ad-blockers to be used for iOS 9 and onward, ad-blocking has grown on the mobile front as well. Anyone making money with advertisements get a fair amount of their revenue from mobile device users, and this has fed into the controversy with ad-blocking. Ad-blockers on mobile devices aren't all that different from ad-blockers on laptops on desktops, but they're still relatively new.(Kelion, 2015) Mobile ad-blockers include AdBlock Plus Mobile and 1Blocker. (Corpuz, 2017)

### Comparison

Hal9000 of Raymond.cc did a study testing 10 different ad-blockers separately on ten different websites, for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The purpose of this study was to see how each ad-blocker fared with time taken to load a page, impact on computer CPU, and impact on computer memory. The study did not cover factors such as how well the ad-blocker blocked advertisements, or comparing the features between the different ad-blockers.

   The study found that AdBlock Plus' "allow acceptable ads" feature makes the extension slow down page loading significantly compared to the other extensions, and the extension used up the most resources for CPU. When it came to computer memory, however, Ad Block Plus did about as poorly as other extensions such as AdRemover and Superblock Adblocker. Turning off this feature, however, AdBlock Plus about matched the median for the ad-blockers in all categories. The study also found that uBlock Origin was about the best in every category. It used up the less CPU, and loaded pages the fastest. Ghostery used less memory than uBlock Origin, but uBlock Origin outperformed Ghostery otherwise. (Hal900, 2017)

### See Also

Privacy Trackers

Future Trends in Plugins

### Works Cited

Brad. (2015, October 8). The 3 best Chrome extensions to protect your privacy (updated for 2017). Retrieved from https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/the-3-best-browser-extensions-to-protect-your-privacy/

Bilton, Ricardo. (2015, September 14). What is ad blocking? Retrieved from http://digiday.com/media/wtf-ad-blocking/

Corpuz, John. (2017, February 8). Best Ad Blockers and Privacy Extensions. Retrieved from http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/565-best-adblockers-privacy-extensions.html

Hal9000. (2017, January). 10 Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Best Performance. Retrieved from https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/3/

Kelion, Leo. (2015, September 8). Apple brings ad-blocker extensions to Safari on iPhones. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-3417373

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