The creator of Adblock Plus, the most popular browser add-on in the world, has finally acted on his crisis of faith and turned off ad blocking for non-intrusive “acceptable ads.” This change has only been made to the Firefox version of the add-on, but Chrome will receive the same treatment in the following months.

By default, when users install or upgrade to Adblock Plus 2.0 — which should be released tomorrow — acceptable ads will be displayed as you surf the web. You will have the option of disabling these ads and returning to your pristine, ad-free web — but as the lead developer, Wladimir Palant, well knows, people rarely change add-on settings unless something seriously annoys them. Indeed, this is why the default option will be to display acceptable ads — because the likelihood of people clicking through some menus to enable the display of ads is slim to none.

The idea of acceptable ads is ostensibly quite noble. For your favorite websites, ExtremeTech for example, you might want to ensure their survival by generating some ad revenue — but that doesn’t mean that you want your browser to be subsumed by animated or noisy Flash ads. “Acceptable ads,” in the words of ABP’s lead developer Wladimir Palant, are “static,” “preferably text only,” and only require “one script that will delay page load.” The long-term goal is to improve the survivability of all websites — but especially small ones, where that Google Ads box on the right is the only source of income.

The only problem is… Adblock Plus, the add-on itself, doesn’t automatically work out what ads are acceptable or not; it relies on a human-curated list of whitelisted ad providers. This list will be entirely maintained by Palant & Co., and at this point it isn’t clear if ABP is receiving monetary kickbacks from the likes of Google, other advertising behemoths, and other websites that rely on ad revenue for their survival. On the one hand, Palant says that Google has “nothing to do with it,” but he also says “we indeed hope to get some income this way.” In other words, it’s still early days for the acceptable ads initiative, and no one really knows how it will pan out.

It’s easy to see how this is a conflict of interest: It’s called Adblock Plus, after all, not SomeAdsBlocked. If an advertiser offers ABP enough money, can the definition of “acceptable” be stretched? Morally, it’s a very tough line to walk. The other point of view, though, is that advertisers might be inclined to tone down their ads so that ABP will rate their ads as “acceptable.” If ABP can singlehandedly stop the use of animated, distracting ads on the web, then surely that’s a good thing. Still, even from this perspective, Palant is acting as a censor — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but again it’s a precarious position to find yourself in.

Read more at Adblock Plus

[Image credit: Flavio Hoffe]