Who's better? Adblock or Adblock Plus?

Adblock Plus founder Wladimir Palant is translated into Chinese on a number of occasions. I hope we can solve some questions that have plagued us for a long time. Thank you for all the support Adblock Plus, we will be in accordance with the original intention of a better and more complete and safer Adblock Plus presented to you!

Who's better? Adblock or Adblock Plus?

Note: It is clearly stated that this article was posted on my private blog, not the Adblock Plus official blog. This article represents only my personal point of view. It seems unwise to grumble at a competitor, but I do not want to bury my findings in this way. If you're here just to attack Adblock Plus and don't care about the article itself, then please be sure to read the re-editing section at the end of the text.

There are currently two popular ad blocker plugins available on the Chrome browser: Adblock and Adblock Plus. Apart from the confusing names, they are irrelevant plugins. I am in charge of the latter, but I am often asked if I would recommend Adblock or Adblock Plus. Because Adblock Plus certainly has a lot of room to grow in chrome, I generally use the phrase as an answer: "These two plugins have different development processes, but the final product is roughly the same." "But recently I was shocked to see that the situation had changed and changed a lot in my examination of Adblock. So the next time someone asks me what's the difference between Adblock and Adblock Plus, I'll let them see this blog post.

Open development

Adblock was an open project at the beginning. It uses Google code hosting to make sure people are visible and write their source code. However, the code base has been deactivated in August 2013. The new project description gives people the ability to download their own source code packages, so you can still see the sources, but to extract personal changes will void your Dickens.

Other people have noticed this. Adblock's supporters have promised that this is only temporary, and a new source code repository will soon be created on GitHub. I did find a place to mention this code base, so at some point it must have been public. But now it seems to have been marked as non-public.

The topic was also mentioned in several other discussions, especially this one in January 2014. This time the supporters suddenly talk about the changes they want to keep private, which is why they cannot make public the code base. In this discussion, it sounds like an April Fool's joke to say nothing before the time is ripe. The discussion ended with "Adblock no public git repository in the near future", without any explanation for the failure of some of the commented workflows (separating public and private changes into different repositories).

Conclusion: Adblock quietly from an open development paradigm to start to hide its changes to users. Users will not be informed of these decisions, nor will they understand the reasons behind them. The source code archive is retained just to pretend that Adblock is still an open source project, which is hard to find, and the project owner apparently wants no one to extract personal changes from it.

What are they hiding?

I don't know what people think, but I'm on impulse to download the source archive to see what changes are in it. That's what I did. There is a changelog in the source archive, but you should go and see for yourself. Here are some key points:

Adblock 2.6.11 (2013-10-25): Adblock the ability to send a unique user ID to the Adblock server every day (you know this, right) is expanded. The server can now decide that the user is visible to the survey-the survey will open immediately on the new tab, regardless of the user's actions.

Adblock 2.6.14 (2013-11-09): Adblock now not only sends a unique user ID to the server, it also transmits user settings to decide whether to pass Google search ads. This change log message is called: "Set the measurement. ”

Adblock 2.6.20 (2014-02-11): Adblock will send a request to goldenticket.disconnect.me each time it is started--but will not be sent two days before the plug-in is installed. After a while it will be discovered that Adblock obviously cooperates with Disconnect.me and advertises for their services to select users. Disconnect's functionality has actually been bundled with Adblock, and its search ads have been added to the white list. It also means that the only user ID mentioned above will be sent to the website every time the user accesses getadblock.com, and the Adblock user accesses getadblock.com.malicious.com and any website with getadblock.com in the hostname. is also sent. If I had a website that was maintained by ad revenue, I would insert a hidden box on each page and use this bug to track Adblock users--maybe some sites have come to me? How does the change log describe these changes? --"Investigate beta tests", yes, that's it.

Adblock 2.6.21-2.6.27:disconnect.me's functionality has been significantly altered, as its developers have in their own hands. Trial and paid membership features are installed, disconnect search ads whitelist fine-tune. According to the changelog, all of these changes are called "Survey beta tests".

Adblock 2.6.29 (2014-04-28): "Adblock Custom Filter" (Adblock unique filter list, default installation and recommended) add a set of filters to whitelist the Mixpanel on the Adblock website.

Adblock 2.7 (2014-06-06): Calling home features are extended. User location information is now sent in addition to the user's only Id,adblock version, the operating system, and whether Google search ads are allowed. Adblock will also give feedback to getadblock.com (or other sites that make friendly requests) that the Adblock was initially installed or had been in use for some time-and that it was still something other than a unique user ID. This function is slightly more adjusted in Adblock 2.7.2.

Adblock 2.7.4 (2014-06-20): You can see the changelog in the extension, whoa! All of a sudden, meaningful changes to the log information are added again, not just "bug fixes" or simply talking about GitHub, which no one else can know about the permissions of a private library. Now people just need to make sure that the information matches the real changes ...

Conclusion: If a project suddenly starts behind closed doors, a bad thing usually happens. In the case of Adblock, they are working with disconnect.me to monetize their users without anyone noticing. When people find out and start asking questions, they try to downplay the impact of these changes.

What about privacy?

From the Adblock project page:

Privacy is paramount.

It reads:

Adblock does not save or retrieve your personal browsing habits or information for any reason other than to run the required information.

That's what they say. It is clear from the above that Adblock does not scruple to assign a unique ID to its users to collect data about the user (such as what settings they use) and to track them every time they visit the Adblock site. You also can't avoid visiting their website because the extension will often send you there, especially at the first run time. There is no privacy policy, so no one knows what will happen to the data. Discussions about the Adblock Privacy policy for some reasons, I guess it involves what data they collect.

Not only that, Adblock also inadvertently installed this "feature" so that any other website can also track Adblock users. And they explicitly allow disconnect.me to be notified whenever Adblock user launches the browser. At a minimum, disconnect.me has a privacy policy and declares that user data is not collected.

Conclusion: Adblock only pretends to care about user privacy. As you can see from their actions, privacy considerations are clearly irrelevant when they make decisions.

Does Adblock plus perform better?

Yes, I think we're better. We try to be open and transparent about everything we do. Our source code repositories are fully public (and can actually be used on both our servers and GitHub so that more people can find them), and we have public issue tracking and public code reviews. More importantly, we will post all the major changes in the blog (these announcements are regularly collated by the publishers), and the changes that really affect all of our users will be published in the extension itself. It also means that we will also announce controversial decisions that we know will cause unpleasant discussions.

We have a very detailed privacy policy. More importantly, we will not just say that we do not collect any data that must be outside-we will do our best. That is, for example, we certainly do not axe the user's ID, which means that the first run of the page is part of the extension--our server does not need to know that someone has installed our extension; We know very little about how users install Adblock Plus--unless these users decide to tell us. There are many things we have to say: "We can't do that." "But I think we have to have such respect for our users."

Editor (2014-08-04 09:20): Two new versions of Adblock are released after the blog post is published. Adblock 2.7.9 fixed the bug I mentioned above and now only getadblock.com can track Adblock users and no other sites. Judging from the response of the Adblock team (see comments on the 27 floor below), it seems that the other issues I have mentioned have not been taken seriously. In fact, Adblock 2.7.9 again expands the calling home feature and now sends the number of ads you've blocked.

Editor (2014-07-30-10:54): I don't usually accept comments that aren't related to the topic. However, every time some of the topics that have little to do with blog post appear, there are people who really want to use the wrong information to black Adblock Plus and accuse me of being too strict when I delete their comments in order to make the discussion more meaningful, so I relax the rule here. Respond to comments that have only a little bit of a relationship with the topic. Nevertheless, please understand that I do not tolerate any insult here. At the same time, I will make sure that the comments I have answered and repeated are not visible. So if you're here for the Black Adblock Plus, make sure you've seen the 8 floor, 11 floor and 22 floor response. There are currently 4 comments not seen: Two contains insulting language, a FUD-related but without any deep content, and a digression too far away.

Who's better? Adblock or Adblock Plus?