Adblock Edge

~ the last words ~

An ad blocker was the second thing installed on any Firefox I set up, from the TTNet broadband years onward. The Turkish web of that period was heavy with interstitials and auto-playing banner Flash, and a blocker was the difference between a usable page and a page that fought you. Which puts me inside the category and outside this particular product, because Adblock Edge was the version you ran if you had actually read what Adblock Plus changed in December 2011.

What changed was Acceptable Ads. Adblock Plus began shipping a whitelist of advertising it considered unobtrusive, enabled by default, and large advertisers could pay to be evaluated for inclusion. The argument for it was that the web needs funding and that a blocker which permits restrained advertising is more sustainable than one which permits none. The argument against it was shorter: people had installed an ad blocker. In 2013 a developer using the handle adstomper took the Adblock Plus 2.1.2 source package, written by Wladimir Palant, and rebuilt it with that one feature removed. Version 2.0.2 of Adblock Edge reached addons.mozilla.org on 6 January 2013.

It was never marketed and it grew anyway. By 20 January 2013 the listing showed 181,590 users. By 9 May 2015 it showed 824,411 users, 263 reviews and a five-star average, which is the kind of rating an extension gets when it does one legible thing and nothing else. The description never got fancier than the first version: a fork of Adblock Plus 2.1.2, same features, without the sponsored ads whitelist.

The last release was version 2.1.9 on 28 March 2015. Three weeks later, somebody opened an issue on Raymond Hill's uBlock repository to flag that the Adblock Edge listing had changed, and quoted the new line verbatim: this addon will be discontinued on June 2015, discontinued in favor of uBlock, a general purpose blocker, that not only outperforms Adblock Edge but is also available on other browsers and, of course, without the Acceptable Ads Whitelist. That issue is dated 16 April 2015. The extension stopped in June, as advertised, and its addons.mozilla.org page was returning 404 by September 2017.

~ the record ~

~ the acceptable ads problem ~

The fork existed because of a disagreement about what the default should be, and that disagreement never got resolved so much as superseded. Adblock Plus kept Acceptable Ads and kept growing, and it stayed the extension most people meant when they said they had an ad blocker. Eyeo, the company behind it, built a real business on the whitelist. Adblock Edge was one of several forks that removed the feature, and the only one of them that got traction in the hundreds of thousands.

Those hundreds of thousands did not include me. I installed whichever blocker the add-ons page put in front of me, which at that point meant Adblock Plus with its default settings intact, and I moved to uBlock Origin later for the reason everybody did, which was that it used dramatically less memory. I followed the whitelist argument closely and it never once changed what I installed. Edge's audience was the narrower group who went looking for a build with the default taken out.

~ the growth curve at the end ~

The shape of this death is the unusual part. Adblock Edge was at its all-time high, 824,411 installs and climbing, at the moment its author put a termination notice on the page, and the notice named a competitor as the reason. There was no funding crisis and no burnout post behind it: the project was not abandoned, it was handed off, with a forwarding address and seven weeks of warning. The GitHub mirror of the repository took its last push in December 2018, some forty-two months past the end, which is about the most activity a dead fork can expect. Raymond Hill's blocker is still shipping, and the thing it replaced here is the only reason anyone looks up this name.

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