After 15 years as shareware, Ad Muncher is now completely free (opens in new tab)

Haha, quite self-sentric, aren't we.

I've been reading sci fi books since the 1980s. I guess, by your logic, any title I haven't heard about is just bad ...

I've been using AdMuncher since 2002 or so and IMHO it's absolutely great. It's the number 1 reason I didn't switch my desktop to Linux. It's also the reason I'm using a Windows tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro).

This is the statistics, since last I installed Windows:

Statistics for Ad Muncher v4.93.33707/5539 Adverts removed: 181,604 Bandwidth saved: 5,346 MB Counter started: June 7, 2014

I've tried AdBlockPlus and uBlock many times, but they leave way more ads than AdMuncher. One of the reasons may be that they are more popular, so advertisers put more effort in defeating them.

There are a few clues in the text like "I've made a net loss running you for the last two years" and "At some point in the future, I may need to offer complimentary software products to Ad Muncher user" hinting that he thinks that bulding a bigger userbase by being free and then bundling ads into it would make more money, as paid users were no longer paying the bills.

It may be unreasonable, but I think it is pretty common. I always feel a little guilty about billing clients when I take on contract work. There are personality types that are always going to find that kind of self assertion difficult. That said, in the American business environment (and anything resembling it), it is absolutely necessary. If his reasons are what he says they are, I think he is making the wrong decision.

Also thinking about this. Wouldn't it be a good idea to open source it and cut down on your staffs' working hours. Seems like you got a fairly big user base so there should be developers out there willing to contribute. Perhaps you could cut down on your costs and merge pull request from open source contributors.

From the "blocks ads in all browsers" tagline this appears to be a filtering proxy server, so it essentially MITMs your connection to filter stuff out and/or modify it before it gets to the browser.

I've been using Proxomitron, which is a similar (discontinued) freeware product, for the same purpose. The only real pain is HTTPS - which AdMuncher doesn't appear to support - but Proxomitron can filter HTTPS too (you need to install a local certificate), albeit it was written at a time when single-core was the norm and so needs to be constrained to run on one core due to some race condition that I'm not too bothered with figuring out and attempting to fix at the moment...

Proximodo is another open-source alternative which aims to be compatible with it but also lacks the increasingly-needed HTTPS MITM feature. (Should we call this "benevolent MITM" since it is completely under the consent and desire of the user, as opposed to the usual "malicious MITM"?)

IMO it's far better than AdBlock. It's a Windows only program and it differs to AdBlock by listening for HTTP packets coming directly off the ethernet adapter (I don't know the full inner-workings of course, but I'm taking an educated guess here). This has a significant benefit over AdBlock / similar browser based solutions for several reasons:

1. It works across any browser (on Windows) 2. It's far more reliable for blocking crazy JS hacks

I'd never heard of µBlock myself, definitely going to check them out; been frustrated constantly with performance loss from Adblock/ABP

Where is this banner coming from? Whose servers are you contacting to get it? Whose javascript is it running? Is it loading flash or java rather than an image? How many people end up tracking you for requesting "one banner"?

As far as I am concerned the advertising industry has screwed themselves over by allowing security threats to be delivered via their networks.

Several years ago, thousands of people were infected with a virus from an ad that snuck its way onto reddit by exploiting a Java flaw. I was one of those people and I have run ad blocking software ever since.