It's worrisome to see so many using Chrome. Mozilla's changing their extension system to mimic Chrome, even, which is going to alienate a lot of their users. A monopoly on browsers is not a good thing, and it'll result in abuse on Google's behalf. They have a vested interest in people's habits, personal information, and advertising. Chrome already listens for "Okay Google" on your microphone; how long before "anonymous" information is always shared with Google? Chrome is spyware, and Mozilla is willingly gimping its browser to follow suit...
It's sad that if Mozilla screws up their browser, there won't be any suitable browsers anymore. Webkit is an okay engine, but nothing matches the flexibility that Firefox has. Without the ability to protect my privacy and secure myself from ad networks and endless information gathering, I may have to skip out on 99% of my web browsing altogether.
There's always elinks or other browsers that can't do ECMAScript, I guess. Then selectively allow cookies, and that might get you somewhere approaching privacy in conjuction with a proxy or VPN.
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Easier than two clicks? Because that's how much it takes to enter Adblock Plus' settings and change whatever you want.
Sure, because open source software never fails. Why rely on carefully crafted and protected code when you can run something written by a million monkeys, for all you know. Besides, open source implementation is a disadvantage here since advertisers, y'know, have access to the source code, just like everybody else, making it trivial to circumvent.
I see no reason to switch and plenty of reasons against it despite never even using the extension.
The person you replied to was talking about trustworthiness. When you have access to source code, you can audit it and verify that it does what it says it does. Proprietary software can't (easily or legally) be inspected and verified, and in the case of an ad blocker could easily be bribed by advertisers. Trust is a big deal when dealing with software that's supposed to protect you, and that's a big reason why security or privacy software tends to be libre software; it can be inspected and verified. If any holes are found, they can be quickly patched. This is one of the key reasons that encryption algorithms are publicly published: to make sure there aren't any vulnerabilities.
As for advertisers circumventing adblockers, I have yet to see it done. As soon as one does it, their method gets added to the list of filters and they must continue to find other methods. In the event an ad-blocker's not enough, there's not much you can do to stop it at the DNS level. A user that intends on viewing the Web without ads *will* find a way, and there's nothing ad networks can do about it.
EDIT: Cool, my double-post was merged. I was worried about that; good to see the software corrects it automatically!
