The Best Adblockers for Firefox & Chrome

Zap annoying popups and more

There was a time when there were no ads on the Internet. Those were the days. But making and updating websites takes time and money. Marketing companies saw the opportunity and jumped on it. That’s also whenadblockerswere born. But what are the best adblockers for bothChromeandFirefoxbrowsers?

Our research shows the following are the best adblockers for Firefox and Chrome, in alphabetical order:

All adblockers tested are also free to use. If you want to see how they stack up against each other, and which one we think is the best, keep reading.

Use Adblockers Fairly

Please think about us, people just like you, trying to pay our bills before you use an adblocker on sites like ours. We try abnormally hard to find the right balance between having ads to pay the bills and not annoying you so that you leave us.

So please, if you do choose to use an adblocker, make sure to whitelist our site.

Now that’s said, let’s look at the best adblockers to use on sites that don’t respect you as much as we do.

How Do We Know Which Adblocker Is Best?

We can’t test all the adblockers available, so we narrowed the list to 6. To do this, we gathered the number of downloads, the number of reviews, and the average rating out of 5 stars for adblockers from theFirefox Add-OnsandChrome Web Store Extensionssites.

Then we used ourReview Factorformula to show us which adblockers were arguably the best. The highest Review Factor possible is 100. This was done to remove the bandwagon effect of people selecting the most downloaded adblocker that has a good star rating.

Review Factor = ((Reviews / Downloads) x Average Star Rating) x 100

After the top 6, the Review Factor dropped off sharply, so it wouldn’t be helpful to you to include anything beyond that. Then came the testing.

The following is our testing methodology:

6. AdBlock Plus (Chrome,Firefox)

AdBlock Plusalso subscribes to the fair-play ads philosophy. They’ve even created an independent committee calledAcceptable Ads. It’s not clear whether they are actively working with any other adblockers than Adblock Plus, so the independence of the committee is debatable.

5. AdBlock (Chrome,Firefox)

AdBlockcan be used for free or you can make a donation. You can get a refund within 60 days if you’re not happy with AdBlock. AdBlock is a fair-play adblocker, meaning it tries to block the mostobtrusive and invasive adswhile allowing more palatable ads so that the sites you’re viewing can still have some income.

4. Ghostery (Chrome,Firefox)

Ghosteryclaims to do the adblocking that all the other adblockers do andspeed up page loading. We weren’t able to test that, but the extension does allow you to see the download time of a page.

What’s really interesting is that Ghostery is open-source. Generally speaking, makingsoftware open sourceleads to it becoming better and more secure. Yet it seems like a bold step as advertisers may use that to find a way to circumvent Ghostery.

3. AdGuard (Chrome,Firefox)

AdGuardemploys a filteringdatabasewith more than 1 millionphishingandmalwarewebsites in it. This means it not only employs traditional adblocking but can protect you from some nasty sites.

2. uBlock Origin (Chrome,Firefox)

uBlock Originis another open-source adblocker, that claims to be, “a wide-spectrum content blocker withCPUand memory efficiency as a primary feature.” What they’re saying is that other adblockers mayuse more resources and slow your computer down. We were unable to test that, as it was beyond the scope of this article.

1. AdBlocker Ultimate (Chrome,Firefox)

AdBlocker Ultimatetouts itself as, “the most effective adblocker there is!”. We haven’t tested every adblocker available, yet AdBlocker Ultimate tops our list. There is no predefined list of acceptable ads for AdBlocker Ultimate. It strives to block everything. Their work is supported by a name-your-price system allowing you to donate what you think is fair viaPayPal.

What AdBlocker Do You Use?

As we mentioned above, there are a lot of adblockers out there. What do you use? Is it different from the ones on our list? What do you like most or least about your adblocker? Let us know in the comments below.

Guy has been published online and in print newspapers, nominated for writing awards, and cited in scholarly papers due to his ability to speak tech to anyone, but still prefers analog watches.Read Guy’s Full Bio

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The Best Adblockers for Firefox & Chrome#

Use Adblockers Fairly#

How Do We Know Which Adblocker Is Best?#

6. AdBlock Plus (Chrome,Firefox)#

5. AdBlock (Chrome,Firefox)#

4. Ghostery (Chrome,Firefox)#

3. AdGuard (Chrome,Firefox)#

2. uBlock Origin (Chrome,Firefox)#

1. AdBlocker Ultimate (Chrome,Firefox)#

What AdBlocker Do You Use?#

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