[Karunamon]

Agreed completely.

For what it's worth, on Firefox anyways, there's a fork of Adblock Plus called Adblock Edge that has no such ethical issues, and as far as I can tell, works with all the addon plugins that worked with ABP like the element hider and popup blocker.

[wallunit]

Why does somebody fork ABP, just to strip out a featere which can already be disabled in the options?

[Karunamon]

Because that "feature" existing points to a serious ethical failing and conflict of interest on the part of the author (namely, taking money to help advertisers bypass the plugin)

Firefox plugins auto-update, who's to say the next update won't have something more objectionable?

[wallunit]

I just noted that Adblock Edge is still based on version 2.0.4 of Adblock Plus, which is outdated for a while. It seems that Adblock Edge isn't maintained anymore and probably never was.

So Adblock Edge will probably get incompatible with future versions of Firefox, anyway. And if there are security issues in the code, it is rather unlikely that they will get fixed, as fast as in upstream Adblock Plus, if at all.

On the other hand I think it is way less likely that Adblock Plus will add a lot of features that wouldn't be in your interest, in the near future.

Sure it is a change in the ethical background of the product. Adblock Plus isn't a hobby project anymore. It's a business now. That means that it has to be profitable. But on the other hand that also means that there are more resources available. So the product can be properly maintained, further improved, and ported to new platforms.

I think this "ethical failing" (as you call it), isn't more or less serious, or unexpected, than when Google introduced in-app ads in Android. In the case of Adblock Plus, as well in the case of Android, I'm happy that the company behind the product found a way to make the product profitable. So they can maintain and improve the product.

[Karunamon]

Few companies take money to help bypass the function of their product!

This is analogous to an antivirus vendor taking money from malware authors to avoid detecting the worm of the day, the only difference being that a text ad isn't as likely to frag your computer.

But hey, in both cases, they're getting money to "maintain and improve the product".

[wallunit]

This comparison implies that everybody can get their ads on that white list, for money. But that isn't true. There are guidelines that define what is acceptable ad and what not. [1] Everybody that gets on the white list has to conform to that guidelines.

So it would be rather like an AV software that lets by default, installers still change your default home page (or stuff like that), if the installer is fair enough to ask for, but would still block any real malware.

[1] http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

[Karunamon]

So great. I download a product who's stated purpose is to block ads, and I have to worry about their author's dealings with ad companies to decide if something will or won't be blocked.

You have a disturbing amount of trust for someone with such an amazingly blatant conflict of interest.

[Karunamon]

I realize this is a bit late, but ABE is not unmaintained. It is based on an older version of ABP, yes, but it is under active development.

Last commit was in May, and besides, the nature of the product (single purpose app) is that it won't have a lot in the way of code changes aside from the odd bug fix. It doesn't need any other feature.

Most of the busywork is being handled in the block lists, and ABP and ABE use the same source (EasyList and others)