[mediumdeviation]

Why wouldn't it be detectable? Ad blockers do their job by removing elements from the page, blocking requests to URLs that match those used to serve advertisements, or a combination both, and either one of those are easily detectable by client-side JavaScript.

[userbinator]

Then perhaps a different method should be used - although removing all the stuff that makes up adverts is one way to do it (and often does make for faster page loads and lower bandwidth consumption), if the end goal is the user just doesn't want to see them, maybe that's what we should do: everything except render certain elements.

(There's also the alternative of targeting the scripts that do this; an anti-anti-adblock! Reminds me of the arms race between malware attempting to prevent itself from reverse-engineering via detecting debuggers and such, and the opponents coming up with anti-anti-debugging, leading to anti-anti-anti, and so forth...)

[mistercow]

How would you do that in a way that wouldn't be detectable to the original page? The only way I can see would be at the browser level, not the extension level.

[userbinator]

Yes, the current extension model is rather limited in that respect, but what if extensions could also interact with the renderer instead of just the page (DOM) contents? Could make for some more... extensive capabilities.