AdBlock Plus wants to encourage non obtrusive advertising. Anyone can apply to have their ads/website added to the acceptable-ads whitelist. Larger companies are charged a maintenance fee.

There is a single checkbox in the options to toggle the whitelist, as well as a link to filter list being used and documentation.

Source: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

Yeah, but silent tracking in the background does not seem obstructive by their definition.

Well, it is AdBlock, not TrackingBlock. There are other extensions out there to help with that problem. Popular ones are NoScript (which improves the web in many more ways, as well) and Ghostery.

From as often as I hear people complaining on forums like HN and reddit that a linked site doesn't work due to NoScript, I would question how many people would agree that it improves the web.

It's not "doesn't work due to noscript", it's "doesn't work because it requires javascript". The blame is on javascript, which degrades the web most of the time.

It IS "doesn't work due to noscript". Browsers come with Javascript. Websites use Javascript. The owner of the site wrote the site using Javascript because browsers support Javascript by default. You specifically turned off Javascript, even though it's a default part of the web.

You broke your experience. If you turn off your car's engine and the brakes and steering stop working, that's not the engine's fault, it's yours.

I do remember a few years ago when everyone in web development talked about how your website has to degrade gracefully in the absence of some technology (JS, flash etc). Now nobody cares. I come across sites that won't even show me the text unless I allow fonts.googleapis.com (via RequestPolicy).

The general point being the most websites I visit I am just reading text. Yet, I usually have to allow a few secondary domains (that serve JS and data), before the text gets into a form better than soup.

A few years ago there may have been a fair amount of users that legitimately didn't have capabilities to display such pages. Now they don't, so why spend a lot of time or change front-end development to accommodate a tiny number of users?

It takes about 10 lines of boilerplate css to turn soup into something readable. Which you can then modify via JS as much as you want.

I don't want to use these browsers. I don't want to run these scripts. I want text, sometimes images, maybe a video. If you are serving scripts instead of the thing I'm there for, you are hurting my browsing experience. You are trying to assume control over my browser and my browsing habits. Noscript can help my browsing experience in some cases, but not always. It's giving me back some control.

Sounds like you want to read documents, not use applications that people are making. That's fine, but it's not the modern web, not by a long shot. It's fine if you don't want to execute someone's app, but don't act as if it's some higher ground.

Why should anyone spend time rewriting their entire UI to run on a server and hack up rendering for you because you don't wish to run their UI code?

I'm not telling what people should or should not do. I'm just saying that they are ruining the experience for me by trying to shove unwanted apps down my throat when the thing that really matters is the text and images which can and traditionally have been done just fine without upstream apps. There is nothing for me in the "modern web", I don't want it if it doesn't help me. The web is not an end, it's a means.

So when people show their work (implicitly asking for critique), I think it is perfectly appropriate critique to point out if the static content (information) that matters cannot be displayed without Javascript. You don't need to run an UI on the server for me. No, you don't need to hack up rendering for me. My browser renders things itself. I want the browser to render things for me, according to my preferences. I don't need your rendering. My browser is my UI. Just give me the content in the right format so it can present it for me, with the interface that I am accustomed to and in charge of.

Incompetent and control-freak authors are making applications that do nothing more than force one bizarre rendering of their documents. We were naive enough to provide tooling to make that feasible, and now it's become a platform which is displacing the World-Wide Web of open hypertext which could be repurposed.

There was a time when we could view html just fine and we didn't need color monitors. Then web developers happened. CSS happened, javascript happened..

Or use the easyprivacy list. https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/

just use adblock edge :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

Thanks, I already do

and of course, it can't be installed on chrome.

almost makes me want to switch to firefox completely and use adblock-edge.

If you are trying to avoid being tracked by Google I don't recommend using Chrome.

If you want to disable the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising", that option is available.

Or just use the other one: https://getadblock.com/

I have adblock installed on every machine I use, and I have that unchecked. Google 'unobtrusive' ads still appear.