The Best Ad Blockers for 2025

Adblock Plus is an old and recognizable name in the ad-blocking space. The free version of the extension functions well in testing. I could block ads and other inline page elements on PCMag.com without fiddling with the Settings menu.

If you open the extension’s Settings, you’ll see additional blocking options available for Premium subscribers. Adblock Plus Premium costs $40 annually or $4 per month. It allows you to block cookie consent pop-ups and other page elements. The latter is a free feature found in uBlock Origin.

If you don’t want to block all ads on a page, you can leave the Acceptable Ads setting checked in the Settings menu. This option allows advertising that Adblock Plus deems unobtrusive to appear on websites. If you uncheck this setting, as I did, all ads should disappear after a page refresh.

On YouTube, the extension’s blocking functioned a bit clumsily. I briefly encountered pre-roll ads that would play and then disappear.

Adblock Plus received middling scores from both AdBlock Tester and EFF’s Cover Your Tracks website because my browser was found to have a unique fingerprint, and the extension failed to block some tracking ads during the testing period.

Overall, I liked how easy it was to use the Ghostery extension. It doesn’t offer the level of customization found with uBlock Origin, but it blocked ads effectively and received top scores from the AdBlock testing website and EFF’s Cover Your Tracks.

The Ghostery browser extension for Firefox has an attractive blue and purple accented interface. In testing, it had no trouble blocking ads on PCMag’s homepage. Like uBlock Origin, Ghostery blocked ads before and during YouTube videos and ads on the YouTube homepage.

Remember that you have to enable the extension’s privacy settings before Ghostery can block ads for you. I recommend reading privacy policies and terms of service documents whenever you download a new app or browser extension. I read Ghostery’s privacy policy and didn’t notice anything unusual.

Privacy Badger is a tracker-eliminating extension created by the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and it was effective during the most recent testing period. Tracking your activity all around the web is a big part of an advertiser’s job, so naturally, Privacy Badger’s tracker detection filter eliminates ads, too. During previous tests, the extension took a long time to start working, but the most recent tests showed no perceptible delay between installing the extension and ads disappearing on PCMag.com.

You can adjust the blocking you want on each page by moving the bars to green, yellow, or red for each ad tracker. Green means all ads and cookies are allowed to load on a page. Yellow blocks cookies only. Red blocks ads and cookies.

I also tested the extension while watching videos on YouTube. Aside from one pre-roll ad during my first session, I didn’t encounter any other ads on YouTube during my tests.

Not surprisingly, the privacy rating for EFF’s Privacy Badger was pretty good on EFF’s Cover Your Tracks website. That said, the extension netted the lowest score (62/100) on the AdBlock Tester website of all ad-blocking extensions I’ve tested. The most significant issues were failures for the flash banners, GIFs, and static image tests.

If it’s an ad, uBlock Origin can block it. Even if it’s not an ad but instead an annoying image or video on a page, the open-source browser extension can still hide the offending element from your view with its handy Element Zapper mode. In testing, I used the extension to block all the ads on the PCMag homepage, along with any mid or pre-roll ads encountered on YouTube.

That said, uBlock Origin doesn’t work on all popular browsers. When you try to download uBlock Origin from the Chrome web store, you’re greeted with a notice stating that the browser extension doesn’t follow best practices. In other words, uBlock Origin doesn’t work with Manifest V3, which is Google’s new platform for browser extensions.

In a GitHub post, the uBlock Origin developers stated that while there is a Lite version of the extension to comply with Manifest v3, no full version is available. The full version still functions for people who use Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Thunderbird’s productivity interface.

During the latest round of testing, uBlock Origin received top marks from Adblock Tester and a decent rating from EFF’s Cover Your Tracks. Despite not playing well with Chrome, uBlock Origin is the most customizable ad-blocking extension I’ve tested.

AdLock is an accurate and very easy-to-use ad-blocking extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. I tested it using Chrome.

AdLock is also available as a total system solution, which purports to block ads within games or other apps on up to five devices. To use this version of AdLock, you’ll need a paid subscription, which starts at $3.50 per month.

The extension blocked all of the ads on PCMag.com immediately without the need to tweak any privacy settings. If you visit the Settings menu within the extension, you can turn off and on rules for different sites.

I also tested the Chrome extension while watching YouTube videos, and my experience was a bit of a mixed bag. While watching music videos, I encountered a couple of pre-roll ads, but later in the day, I watched a “free with ads” movie without any interruptions.

As for the other independent tests, EFF’s Cover Your Tracks reported that AdLock blocked tracking ads effectively but failed to block invisible trackers. The score from AdBlock Tester was much better, though, a 96/100. The only failure came from a failed sentry script execution test.