I hope @dibdot can elaborate, but here's my viewpoint on differences between simple-adblock and adblock:
Adblock is better in the following:
- Adblock supports more complex blacklists thru its powerful processing engine.
- (Might need a correction on that) Adblock supports checking if the domain is blacklisted from WebUI.
- All the ad-blocking innovation is happening at Adblock.
- Adblock is written by a great developer.
Having said all that, I still pursued publishing simple-adblock in the LEDE repo (after adblock has already been published), because it's based on a simpler script originally published by bole5 from OpenWrt forums and thusly:
- simple-adblock can be fully-configured by LEDE/OpenWrt native uci command.
- because of the above, Web UI for simple-adblock was easy to implement and I hope is easier to use.
- because it doesn't support some complex blacklists, its processing of supported blacklists is much faster.
- it starts processing downloaded blacklists while the next in line is being downloaded, leading to even better start up times.
- the code/functionality is static, I have no plans nor any features to implement.
- while I greatly benefitted from not only having the source code of adblock, but also on multiple occasions personal advise from @dibdot, I'm not a developer, so I may have cut corners on certain aspects or the code might not be as neat.