Adblock Plus (ABP) is nagging and asking for money

#1

Dear Endless Developers, you have built a beautiful operating system and desktop. You have the best intentions providing equal and mindful access to technology for every one. I subscribe to all that has been said in ANS325 and so much more over the years since I first heard about it. But there is some issue that a few people make due to search results doctoring or SEO. It looks like ABP has been introduced years ago in 3.4, and somehow I did not notice it. However, today I did. Others have noticed it earlier though and reported it to you.

I know there will be a barrage of shit posting and more SEO coming this way if ABP spindoctors have it on their alert tracker. That’s what they do.

Screenshot from 2023-02-26 09-48-36
Screenshot from 2023-02-26 09-48-361600Ă—900 452 KB

Launching the browser and finding this is unacceptable for an OS with core values like yours. Unless you have some sketchy agreement with eyeo GmbH please replace it with uBlock. It’s also well maintained and has a concise statement: Why don’t you accept donations? Contradictory to what you find when you want to know more about the company behind ABP, from the company themselves:

eyeo GmbH - Where ad filtering meets profitability

Wow. Catering for a CEO, CTO and PR manager including their luxury cars and houses to manage 1 and a half or so developers to write functionality to include existing block lists which another developer and his community can apparently do in their free time … breaks the bank? Well then I would remove the chief spindoctor, the technical spindoctor and the PR spindoctor from the payroll.

It’s not anymore about personal preference, Mr. Wladimir Palant made a choice against the community of users when eyeo was founded and controversy introdiced, and that’s it.

I can setup a recurring donation directly to Endless and I’m sure a few more users would do so too if you are in need of money. But I don’t want the possibility of code running that presents such kind of sketchy and twisted wording, no matter what a users current location and income is (I guess they can doctor this like so many other things they doctor too). Please Endless! Take my money, but remove this honor less and unethical component, it destroys everything you stand for.

#2

I tend to agree that Adblock Plus is a nasty extension and have never understood why Endless includes it. It is fortunate that it can be deleted via extensions in Chromium’s settings with no bad effect. Personally I use UBlock Origin with Chromium, which can be obtained via the Chrome store. More generally though I install the flatpack Gnome-Web (Epiphany) and use that as my default browser.

#3

Thanks for raising this. On my own machines, I actually use for ublock origin. I wasn’t aware that the “ABP has been installed” screen had become so aggressive. We’ll discuss what to do internally.

For the record, Endless doesn’t get any money from eyeo for preinstalling ABP. The original (and current!) motivation for shipping an adblocker by default was:

The current web advertising ecosystem is not respectful of user privacy, performance, or data usage. We want to improve that experience for all users, especially since Endless users are often new to computers and are less likely to be familiar with ad blocking technology.

#4

Absolutely reasonable. I didn’t want to imply that Endless is (indirectly) selling their users, thus my previous wording that ABP is very prominent in search results. I try to support projects financially when I can with donations.

#5

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

#6

Resurrecting an old thread: we will stop automatically installing Adblock Plus in the forthcoming Endless OS 5.1 release.

1 Like