The list of browser extensions that in some form has backpedaled from their central premise and main function, the list is pretty long. Ghostery, Adblock, AdblockPlus, ...

I don’t disagree it’s a lot, NoScript was another example, uBlock and uMatrix by no fault of themselves were also hijacked being open source, Ghostery was sold, and Adblock Plus with acceptable ads wasn’t bad as they said. It was widely reported, I continued installing ABP, since it was easy, wasn’t hard to turn off acceptable ads, and I think that direction they tried to move the industry in wasn’t harmful. I might have moved back to Adblock or learned about hosts but if they were successful we’d have less resource hungry ads, a net benefit for everyone, especially when using public computers or helping someone with IT.

Ghostery was more widely reported as Audacity adding telemetry. Everyone who cared knew long before to leave or uninstall it.

Hosts blocking is reliable and I’ve never had a single malicious one with the wide assortment I used. PiHole hasn’t been hijacked either and I think it’s unreasonable to think that no group can make mistakes, faltering can’t ever happen, I really don’t think Adblock Plus was that bad.

If the market wasn’t saturated with methods to block, I would have stuck with them if they were remorseful.

-Sent from my not private Apple device I’ll still use since it’s got a huge userbase on messaging in the US