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Ad Muncher: keeps the brain intact while surfing the Net - beats AdBlock!

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Carol Haynes:
You just need the serial number that you got in the email when you bought AdMuncher.

brotherS:
I'm afraid that email is gone forever... along with my Outlook Express installation from 'back then'. I don't even know which of my gazillion email addresses I used when I registered... that's why I asked for an 'alternative solution'.

Innuendo:
Boy, I didn't mean to stir up a hornet's nest with my little joke, but here's a reply on a few of the points above (in no particular order):

BrotherS, at one time you could just move install AdMuncher over your old directories and your registration info would be preserved. However, the latest versions have moved to a stricter online validation so I don't know if it will still work, but try it and see.

Glacial pace of development: It's been a slow road because it's been a two man operation. Fortunately, their income levels have increased to the point where they could afford to hire on another programmer. Hopefully, once he gets up to speed on the code things will move faster.

Forcing people to move to the beta version: They have come up with a new, more efficient way to filter that requires quite a bit fewer signatures to accomplish what they were able to do before with the bigger signature list. Unfortunately, this new way of doing things makes the new signature list incompatible with the old. Having to maintain two signature lists would slow development down farther than it already is.

Post-poned features: Gzip/HTTP 1.1 (yeah, they are practically the same feature code-wise) and 64-bit support have been a long time coming and people have a right to be upset. These were all supposed to be in the v4.72 update. However, after being near-lynched on the support forums for Vista support, the author decided to drop everything and get Vista support implemented ASAP or risk losing his entire customer base. What was to come in v4.72 was pushed back to v4.73.

Unfortunately, on the way to v4.73 Windows 7 was announced and builds were starting to pop up everywhere. It was then discovered the hack to get AdMuncher to work with Vista failed miserably on Windows 7. It was then decided by the author to move back those promised features again and re-writing AdMuncher and the installer properly to support Vista and Windows 7...and hopefully, every future Windows OS with UAC. He's concentrating on OS support first and the other features later. Whether or not that was the right thing to do, I cannot say.

One other thing is slowing development and that has been re-writing the old Assembly code into some flavor of C for easier maintaining of the codebase.

My guess is Murray is a perfectionist and he's got a case of OCD with his code not working just the way he wants it to before he releases it. That's just a guess, though, and may not be accurate.

AdMuncher is not perfect and I read above someone is leaving it behind for something else, but what? I've yet to find anything that does what AdMuncher will do for every program you have installed. Most adblockers restrict themselves to working with web browsers. If there are any true alternatives to AdMuncher I'd love to hear them.

superboyac:
Just email the developer, he'll send you your registration info.

As for Ad Muncher's development pace, yeah, it's slow.  But it works.

Josh:
Innuendo, I respect that they have hired another developer, but the problem with that is now, as you said, he has to play catch up and learn the code. Also, after talking with Murray, I am sure that he will have to triple check all code as the last developer they hired didn't know his stuff and caused many issues with actual releases.

The other issue I have with the slow development is the constant promise of all of these features which keep getting pushed to the right. Please notice, it took nearly 1.5 years AFTER Vista's release to get support for it. Windows 7 came out and they decided to not make the same mistake and jump on board early. Fine, good plan. But what about the other features which were promised for 4.73, in beta since Jan09? What about all of the users who don't have a version of ad muncher installed that is set to check for BETA updates? Unless you specifically know about the forums, irc channel, or the beta's, a normal user would not know to update. I did a test and did not update my father only to see if he noticed ad's starting to appear. Within 2 weeks of no updating, he reported to me that he started getting intermittent ad's which only increased as the month went on. It was at that time I told him to upgrade. Had I not been around, he would have assumed the product stopped working. Yes, releasing two lists can be counterproductive, but if you push out a new list format, RELEASE A STABLE VERSION so that users can take advantage of it. Don't force something onto any machine with the beta tag. My dad took 15 minutes of explaining as to why I was putting something that was labelled as a "test version", his understanding of the word beta, onto his machine. I understand that the code is stable and likely will not cause issues, but that is not something most users understand.

As I said, I support what the developers are doing but I feel they have promised too much and are taking too long to deliver what they promised. If this were someone serving as a project manager, they would have been fired in my line of work. I will hate to see when they try and venture into linux territory come 5.0's 5 year from now release. Development on the Windows version will probably come to a halt.

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