After uBlock Origin

I knew that uBlock Origin was becoming ineffectual in Google Chrome, and knew that was going to happen with Microsoft Edge as well, but I didn't know when. The answer (for me, anyway): Yesterday.

The cause, according to CoPilot:

uBlock Origin originally used Manifest V2, which allowed extensions to intercept and block network requests in real time using the webRequest API .... Manifest V3, introduced by Google and adopted by Chromium-based browsers like Edge, replaced this system with the declarativeNetRequest API, which only allows a static set of rules and removes real-time interception ...

Or, in English, a new era of anti-ad-blocking infrastructure is pranging the old ad-blocking infrastructure.

So this morning I went looking for a new ad-blocking solution. I prefer free or freemium, and the the Edge extension I'm auditioning at the momend is Adblock Plus (not an affiliate link).

So far, so good. If you try it because of this post and if it works for you, you're welcome.

Longer-term readers of this blog may recall that I resisted using an ad blocker at all for quite some time. 

In my view, it was a tacit agreement of sorts: Sites agreed to provide me with content, the price of which was that I had to put up with ads. And I stuck to that for a little while until the damn things became so intrusive and annoying that I just couldn't seem to read an article without nine pop-ups every 30 seconds and 39 static ads lining the edge of everything. Then I became a hypocrite on the subject.

These days, if I like a site, I usually turn my ad blocker off to see what happens. If they keep the advertising to a reasonable maximum, I leave the ad blocker off. If the ads make the site effectively unreadable, well, ad blocking gets turned on, or, if I consider the site valuable enough, I might pay cash for the ad-free version.