Jeff has mentioned it in their forums too.

AdGuard is indeed the better Ad Muncher. I will even take it a step further and say that AdGuard is the heir to Ad Muncher's throne. Features that Ad Muncher's author has been promising for years, but never delivering on are in AdGuard today and are working darn well.

AdGuard program development is quite active and it's very easy to access the beta versions to play with new features that are in the pipeline. I bought Ad Muncher waaaay back in the day at a bargain price for a lifetime license and even at its peak, the development cycle wasn't as active as AdGuard's has consistently been.

Privacy concerns for AdGuard that have been mentioned in this thread are valid, but you can turn those features off if you do not wish to use them.

The Man-In-The-Middle 'attack' sure sounds scary, but it is really the only way one can intercept and manipulate HTTPS traffic in order to filter ads from HTTPS traffic. Realistically, though, how much of an 'attack' is it when *you* are the man who is in the middle? However, you can disable the feature for web sites individually or turn the feature off altogether. This is merely an optional feature for those who want to retaliate towards malevolent entitities who think it's funny embedding their advertisements in encrypted web traffic.

Pricing, especially for the lifetime licenses, is at holy-crap-that's-crazy levels if one buys from the AdGuard homepage. Fortunately, BitsDuJour and StackSocial have teamed up to offer a deal for a lifetime license covering 2 PCs + 2 Android devices for $39.00:

https://bitsdujour.stacksocial.com/sales/adguard-premium-lifetime-subscription

The offer is set to expire in 10 hours as of this writing, but it's already been renewed on the site at least once. Heck, it may be perpetually renewed ad nauseum into infinity for all I know, but $39.00 is a good deal. Full disclosure, I thought it a good enough deal to buy twice (for 4 PCS + 4 Android devices).

No other ad-blocking solution available today, other than Ad Muncher, will block ads anywhere...even outside one's browsers.

From their knowledge base:

https://kb.adguard.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/29/10/filtering-support-for-https-connections-in-portable-browsers

It's no secret that since version 5.7 Adguard is able to filter secured connections (https).

For proper filtering of secured connections, a mechanism called Man-In-Middle is used. By the way, filtering of secured connections in the popular antiviruses works the same way. E.g: Eset Nod32 and Bitdefender.

For this method to work correctly, Adguard imports its own root certificate in certificate store that your browser uses. If https-connection filtering is enabled, Adguard automatically detects browsers installed on your computer and installs the root certificate in their stores.

@Jibz

Thanks for link. Not sure how I feel about trusting an "unknown" company to be a man-in-the-middle for ssl... seems a bit risky(?)

Think I will wait till adguard gives you a way to whitelist sites from ssl filtering.

Release notes from their current version states they are working on that:

Coming Soon:
Fully disable SSL interception for the websites using “Extended Validation” certificates. This type of certificates is mostly used by financial companies, banks, etc.

Think I will wait till adguard gives you a way to whitelist sites from ssl filtering.

They have offered this feature for a while now. I've had to whitelist a couple financial sites from SSL filtering in order for them to work correctly. Again, you can turn off SSL filtering completely if you wish as well.

I just dealt with an issue where any HTTPS site in Firefox told me the connection was untrusted. I narrowed it down to Adguard's MITM feature to deal with filtering ads on encrypted traffic.

This knowledge base article didn't solve my problem, but linked me to some instructions on how to manually import the certificate in Firefox. HTTPS traffic appears to be working again now.

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Below are some search terms I used while trying to find a solution, which will hopefully help others find this thread if they experience similar issues:

• all https sites in firefox are untrusted
• "This Connection is Untrusted" for all https sites in firefox

The strange thing is that I've been using AdGuard on my PC with Firefox for weeks, if not a couple of months, and everything was fine. Then one day after a reboot, all HTTPS traffic in Firefox was broken. And since I generally only visit one site via HTTPS in Firefox, I thought it was an issue with the site's CA for several hours before finally realizing every HTTPS site I tried to access was giving me similar errors.