Is Adblock Plus a safe extension?

Is Adblock Plus a safe extension?

I just tried Adblock Plus for the first time in my life.

I'm on Chrome on Windows 8.1 and noticed some weird behaviours when it comes to the extension. If I click a link (any link, not just Google) within the website, Adblock Plus pauses the loading of the page. That's quite annoying for web designers because I can't see what's happening within the webpage until I disable the extension. Also, some links within the webpage are highlighted in red, some are in orange and some in yellow (not all of them).

I know I've heard about extensions such as Adblock Plus before but I don't know if they're safe for user's computers or if they can do damage to the computer. Is Adblock Plus safe? I don't mind losing some functionality if it means that I can browse the web without having to worry about getting viruses or malware.

3 Answers.
In short, ad blocking extensions are safe, but the way they work is inherently bad for performance. However, we'd like to encourage users to use them, and so we've been working on a new way of doing this that you'll find works much better.

Ad blocking extensions are safe - just don't install them if you care about your browsing speed! (Ads are the biggest cause of slow page loads.) Ad blocking extensions take advantage of a new and highly efficient technique called HTTP/2 that's coming to the web soon. Ad blockers work by stopping the page from loading all of the code on a page before it's even seen - this speeds up loading by around 20x compared to older browsers. The downside to this is that it means that you get the content of a page with less detail.

The new AdBlockPlus 2.0 ad blocker works by loading the page first, and only blocking ads and overlays once it has fetched the full contents of the page. This method saves bandwidth and page loading time, but means that you see less content than the previous version.

We believe this is a fair trade-off for the benefit it brings, and that it's good for users, so we've been working on this for months. The end result is AdblockPlus 2.0, which will be released soon.