AdSilence Adblocker Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. Why should a person choose AdSilence Adblocker over its competitors?

   Because the privacy claim can be checked instead of believed. Three practical differences: there is no acceptable-ads programme, so no advertiser can pay to get through. It works out of the box with no configuration and no account. And blocking is free — the paid tier only adds fingerprint randomisation, automatic cookie-banner answering and warnings about addresses imitating well-known sites.

2. What makes AdSilence Adblocker unique?

   It does not request the webRequest permission. Most blockers do, and that permission lets an extension read every network request you make — effectively your entire browsing history. AdSilence hands its rules to the browser instead (declarativeNetRequest) and the browser applies them, so the requests never reach us. There is nothing for us to log because we never see it. The manifest is public and short enough to read in a minute, and the full source is on GitHub under the GPL-3.0.

3. What's the story behind AdSilence Adblocker?

   Several ad blockers with millions of users have been sold over the years, and the new owners turned them into tracking tools. The code was closed, so nobody could tell until someone recorded the network traffic. The design question was therefore not "how do we promise we are trustworthy" but "what can we build so that nobody has to trust us". The answer was to not ask for the permission in the first place, and to publish the source so the claim is verifiable.

4. How would you describe the primary audience of AdSilence Adblocker?

   People who want an ad blocker that simply works from the first page load and who care that the tool itself cannot profile them. Not power users who want to write their own filter rules — for that, uBlock Origin remains the better choice. Typical users install it, never open the settings, and never create an account.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building AdSilence Adblocker?

   TypeScript throughout. The extension is Manifest V3 and uses declarativeNetRequest for blocking, with esbuild and Vite for the build and React for the options and popup pages. The server side runs Node.js with Fastify, PostgreSQL via Prisma, and Stripe for payments. Everything in the extension is open source under the GPL-3.0.