The Best Adblockers for Firefox & Chrome

by Guy McDowell

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 when adblockers were born. But what are the best adblockers for both Chrome and Firefox browsers?

The Best Adblockers for Firefox & Chrome image 1

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

Table of Contents

    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 the Firefox Add-Ons and Chrome Web Store Extensions sites.

    Then we used our Review Factor formula 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:

    1. Do a clean install of Chrome and Firefox.
    2. Install a single adblocker with its default settings.
    3. Test using the sites canyoublockit.com and adblock-tester.com
    4. Calculate the Test Average using:
      Test Average = (CanYouBlockIt Extreme Avg + Adblock Tester Avg)/2
    5. Uninstall the adblocker
    6. Empty the browser cache and restart the browser to make sure it’s like new before performing steps 2 through 7 on the next adblocker to be tested.
    7. Calculate the Overall Score out of 100.
      Overall Score = (Review Factor + Test Average)/2

    6. AdBlock Plus (Chrome, Firefox)

    BrowserChromeFirefox
    Score3532

    AdBlock Plus also subscribes to the fair-play ads philosophy. They’ve even created an independent committee called Acceptable 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.

    CanYouBlockIt Results

    AdBlock Tester Results

    5. AdBlock (Chrome, Firefox)

    BrowserChromeFirefox
    Score3832

    AdBlock can 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 most obtrusive and invasive ads while allowing more palatable ads so that the sites you’re viewing can still have some income. 

    CanYouBlockIt Results

    AdBlock Tester Results

    4. Ghostery (Chrome, Firefox)

    BrowserChromeFirefox
    Score3940

    Ghostery claims to do the adblocking that all the other adblockers do and speed 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, making software open source leads 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.  

    CanYouBlockIt Results

    AdBlock Tester Results

    3. AdGuard (Chrome, Firefox)

    BrowserChromeFirefox
    Score4040

    AdGuard employs a filtering database with more than 1 million phishing and malware websites in it. This means it not only employs traditional adblocking but can protect you from some nasty sites. 

    CanYouBlockIt Results

    AdBlock Tester Results

    2. uBlock Origin (Chrome, Firefox)

    BrowserChromeFirefox
    Score4343

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

    CanYouBlockIt Results

    AdBlock Tester Results

    1. AdBlocker Ultimate (Chrome, Firefox)

    BrowserChromeFirefox
    Score5532

    AdBlocker Ultimate touts 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 via PayPal.

    CanYouBlockIt Results

    AdBlock Tester Results

    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.

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