And Adblock Plus itself has disclosed that big entities are paying them a licensing fee for whitelisting their ads. It means that they do not block ads that are considered as Acceptable Ads and hence they have whitelisted few advertisers.Īctually, if reports like this and this are true then Google and other large advertisers have paid Adblock Plus to not block their ads. Both Adblock Plus and Adblock allow what they call “non-intrusive advertising”. That’s not all! There’s an ugly similarity too. It basically means that if Adblock Plus is blocking an ad then it will be blocked by AdBlock as well or vice versa. In fact both use the same filters as well and they are calling it the EasyList(created by Adblock Plus). Once again, both AdBlock for Chrome and Adblock Plus for Chrome offers similar features as far as basic features (malware protection, shows number of ads blocked, blacklisting, whitelisting) and options (acceptable ads, right-click menu) are concerned. However, AdBlock has almost 2x more ratings than Adblock Plus on Chrome Web Store, so I guess it’s safe to assume that it’s the most popular ad blocker on Google Chrome. and ‘AdBlock’ is available for Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and iOS.Īdblock Plus is the most popular Firefox add-on with over 21 million users (it’s got the first-mover advantage on Mozilla Firefox) and AdBlock is the most popular Chrome extension (it’s got the first-mover advantage on Google Chrome).īy the way, both AdBlock and Adblock Plus claims that it’s the most popular ad blocker and both have over 40 million users. Now ‘AdBlock Plus’ is also available for Google Chrome, Android, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc. What’s the difference? Well, it sounds similar but they are two different extensions developed independently.Īpparently, AdBlock was inspired by Adblock Plus itself when it was just a Firefox only add-on. Adblock & Adblock Plus: A Brief HistoryĪs you probably know, the two most popular ad blockers for Google Chrome are AdBlock and Adblock Plus. But it’s something else - which I will explain below. The only thing is… it’s NOT the extension’s ad blocking capability that I find interesting. However, I tried AdBlock few months back - when YouTube ads became increasingly annoying - and immediately realized that it’s a must-have for me.

So, I argued with myself why should I install an adblocker when it doesn’t make any difference. In fact, as I write this blog post, both AdBlock and Adblock Plus have over 50 million users. I was actually not using an adblocker until few months ago as I rarely click ads. It’s no secret that ad blocking extensions like AdBlock, Adblock Plus, and AdBlock Pro are becoming increasingly popular today with over 200 million active users and it’s costing publishers billions of dollars.

Adblock option on mozilla firefox