Read the README. ABP sold out a while back and now shows ads on certain websites who pay money to ABP. uBlock Origin doesn't show ads on any website unless you specifically allow it.
You can support ad-based sites with either tool by whitelisting a site.
uBlock requires you to do this explicitly for each site you want to support through ad revenue. I suspect most novice users will never do this.
ABP is now using their user base as leverage to extract payment from some sites to show ads by default. I don't think that is a good idea at first blush, but there may be arguments for the practice I haven't considered.
A lot of quality content I find is on niche blogs where I might only read an article or two. These blogs are often advertising supported.
I'd much rather outsource the work of whitelisting to ABP than having to do an individual consideration on every single site I visit.
There's also the fact that I never want to see malicious/intrusive advertising. If I maintain my own whitelists, I have to experiment site by site. If I use ABP, they do that experimentation and enforcement for me.
The thing that totally frustrates me is how many people in this thread seem to be totally incapable of grasping that ABP in fact offers exactly what I want: someone blocking intrusive advertising, but not all advertising, with me having to do zero work. As a bonus, there's even a business model attached (so they're less likely to randomly sell out their install base to a malware provider).
This argument makes no sense at all, a niche blog generates very little traffic which means it has very little advertising revenue, and this revenue goes to the hosting company which offers hosting for free in exchange of putting theirs ads on your blog.
Those niche blogs could choose to pay for their hosting and it costs less than 10$ a month ($5.99 or $8.25 at wordpress.com[1])
If the advertising based business model failed overnight, I highly doubt finding 75 to 100$ a year to stay online would be out of reach.
You do know that about 10% of the advertisers get in the whitelist by paying instead of conforming to the acceptable ads program ? You probably know that the acceptable ads is very limited in scope and most non intrusive ads never get whitelisted but surely you know that adblock plus has now evolved into an ad selling platform.
It seems to me that adblock plus does not fit your stated ideological stance as well as Brave[3] does. You should consider ditching ABP and using Brave instead which blocks tracking and replaces all ads by other non-intrusive ads and also offers and option to pay websites directly so you could contribute to the hosting fee of those niche blogs.
I suspect most novice users will never install uBlock, because the article they read in <whatever> will mention ABP. :)
It just depends on what makes sense for the individual, a default whitelist because you want to support some advertising (that is, if you thought about it at all), or default black everything.
Theoretically, if the ads that were whitelisted were flagged enough or enough complaints were raised to ADP, this would be a financial signal to both ADP and the sites that the ads are unacceptable. I am not saying this is exactly how it goes as I haven't the slightest what goes on behind the closed doors at ADP (and use µblock0 myself); nor do I endorse the idea of using one company to coerce another, but I would imagine that it allows for at least a channel for more direct responses as to why an ad is not acceptable.
That is, I do not believe that other solutions have a very clear way for advertisers to determine what is and isn't acceptable; for the sake of argument, this puts aside the fact that some unacceptable aspects of ads should be common sense (loud noises, pop-unders, fake download links, etc). Basically when an adblocking user reaches the site, they have no means of communicating why they dislike the ads on that site - most of the time, it's just a blanket block that users never think about. So even if you really like a website and would love to support it through the ad revenue, your current options don't send a very clear signal as to what was disruptive and dislikable.
Again, I'm not saying I fully agree with this, but I think it's an argument that has some value, and reflects the greater difficulty with advertising in general; it's a one-way communication venue, and the few times that we as viewers are able to get a signal back to the other side, it's usually ignored until legislation gets involved. (See the CALM Act and it's overall ineffectiveness [1]) Basically there isn't really much control over what advertisers actually do, and even Truth in Advertising laws basically have no teeth except for extremely blatant falsehoods.
Adblocking is the first major way that viewers have been able to push back against advertising, and I'm with that 100% since I just think it's pointless in and of itself - it's wasteful in my opinion how much infrastructure exists out there just for the sake of providing advertisements. But I also understand that likely advertising isn't going away, so having some method to signal back clearly and directly to advertisers what is wrong with an ad is good in my mind. Said signal having some teeth to make sure they get the message is also important, else it's not much better than before. But not giving any indication as to what's wrong doesn't really help either. (I'm not blaming anyone but stubborn advertisers here, but I think it helps us as activists if we can make it 100% what we don't like about specific advertisements instead of just doing a blanket block).
I suppose You could copy paste the ABP whitelist into ublock origins so you do not forfeit ublock performance advantage.
IMHO you choose yourself the websites you want to whitelist, this way you can give away your privacy for fraction of pennies to the websites you choose to support. What if you want to support a controversial website that has been banned from most conventional advertising networks (for example the piratebay) ?
Then again the trade off between permanent own privacy loss for fraction of pennies make no sense to me.
Ads are not inherently evil, the omnipresent associated tracking and surveillance is. Problem is almost all ads come with tracking nowadays which in turn makes them evil.
That's another reason ublock origins is far superior to ABP: it blocks tracking by default. Of you can configure each one to mimick the other but users seldom change the defaults hence the 75% of german users subscribed to ABP acceptable ads program, (ratio is higher than usual because adblock are mostly used by tech savvy and privacy concerned users).
Then again you can't make ABP uses a third of the resources it uses so you would have to find a way to make ublock origins use three times more resources to make it work exactly as ABP.
I admit I have made a mistake in following your choice of wording. The good/evil dichotomy is rather inappropriate as it is an ideological statement itself.
Let me rephrase that differently: as a matter of fact privacy is a requirement for freedom. Tracking by definition destroys (or at the very least entails) privacy, thus effectively preventing freedom from emerging.
Then it is a matter of personal preferences. Personal preferences may differ on the desirability of freedom of self or others. It is said that those who care for freedom will act in a way providing freedom for everyone, the others others will act selfishly and enjoy the freedom provided by those who care.
Though it should be noted that ABP and UBO are two completely different things. ABP is an adblocker, it aims at making money filtering and selling ads. UBO is a general-purpose blocker, its main goal is to help users neutralize the privacy-invading apparatus of which the visible part is ads. That's why UBO features options to block webrtc, remote font, link prefetch, hyperlink auditing and beacon while ABP has none of this but features acceptable ads.
