I tried Adfender and found it was great at blocking ads. Yesterday I found it's great at logging every link you click on and sending them to the developer site. I was using Firefox and in the status bar I saw "Waiting for local.adfender.com". Rather than keeping a local database of ad sites (or in addition to), it's bouncing every link you click off their server. It also logs every link on your computer (appdata/local/adfender) and there's no way to turn off logging. I'm so sick of freeware that comes at the cost of losing your privacy. If Adfender wants to help us block ads, why do they record every link we visit on the web? That seems like a big trade-off.
I took one of my test drives - basically a clean Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with no apps. - and added 127.0.0.1 local.adfender.com to the hosts file. Then I installed adfender. Seems to run okay, blocks ads and no squawking about local.adfender.com being unreachable. Should this approach protect me, or am I kidding myself?
Good idea. That host entry will prevent your data from being shipped off to Adfender HQ. But will you still be able to download updates to the ad database? I think you will. Let us know.
It appears the hosts file entry does not affect adfender updates. Twice now I have seen the system tray balloon appear stating that the "filters were updated successfully". I can also go to the adfender UI and manually update the filters with no error message.
That's what I have been using. I added Adfender as a test. Using Firefox I notice that sometimes ads appear briefly when I open a page, but then they are closed by Adblock+. When I was using Adfender the ads didn't show up at all, which was nice. I have gone back to using just Adblocker+ and I do see the ads briefly, but it's not a problem. This didn't used to happen with earlier versions of Firefox and Adblock+, but seems to have started around version 30 of Firefox.
Im still using Firefox 28, they destroyed FF after that, and even using things like Classic Theme Restorer doesn't get it back to how it is in 28 and previous - Im not upgrading unless they return the UI to 28, which is unlikely It would probably be ok with a single screen, but I use Eyefinity and have to scale FF to the centre screen, things like double clicking the tab bar to open a new tab on 28 works fine, but on any version higher it maximises and minimises the whole browser, which on 3 screens is a PITA because it maximises across all 3 - and I just don't like what they've done to the UI at all, even the menu - not a fan