Blocker for Ad-blockers?

#Ad-blockers have become vital for safe and privacy focused browsing. While there are ad-networks who follow good code of conduct and would only approve ads that don’t insert malicious scripts or track the users heavily, there are a lot of ad-networks who couldn’t care less as they are trying to make money.

I’ve been a professional blogger to understand how important it is for a publisher to include ads to sustainably continue to maintain the publication and to continue putting the efforts in publishing valuable content for the readers. Unfortunately, it’s sad that in the race to make money - these publishers forget the most crucial factor of a successful website and that is the reader’s experience. If reading the blog post is going to be a struggle and as a reader, I’ll see more ads than the content - chances are either I will figure out a way to avoid the ads or stop visiting your site.

That’s why I decided to implement Ad Block Plus on my browser to avoid getting bombarded with ads that I don’t want to see. To be considerate, I decided to allow Acceptable Ads program - as I don’t mind non-intrusive ads and ads from ethical ad-networks.

Life was good, until some publishers decided to counter-attack by showing popups that force you to disable the ad-blocker for their websites - some allowed to continue without disabling the ad-blocker, but not all. And even though the Ad Block Plus could zap these lightbox powered popups, it didn’t truly help as most of the time the scrolling ability was lost - so one couldn’t read the article properly.

My solution in this case was to remove Ad Block Plus in favor of uBlock Origin. Now, it not only blocks tracking scripts, stupid ads, it also blocks these ad-blocker blocking scripts as well!

Do you use ad-blockers? If yes - which one, do you prefer?

Update, August 2026

Three years on and the desktop side hasn’t changed for me. uBlock Origin is still doing the job and I have not had to think about it since.

Two things worth adding as well.

The first one is about YouTube, because I get asked about it a lot and the answer is boring - uBlock Origin already blocks YouTube ads, so if you went with it above then you’re already covered! There is a whole category of extensions named some variation of “AdBlock for YouTube” and I would stay away from those, as a few of them have been sold off over the years and quietly turned into the very thing they claimed to block.

The second one is the gap I lived with for far too long and that is the phone. My desktop was sorted, however my Android phone was still full of ads sitting inside apps, where a browser extension cannot reach them at all. BlockAds sorted that out for me, and it is open source with the code sitting on GitHub.

Do you block ads on your phone? I’d be curious to know what you are running!