I learned something new today (it probably should have been intuited, but for whatever reason, not) that having more than one adblocker program at time isn't a good idea.

I opened my browser a couple of nights ago and the renewal notice was there for AdBlock Plus; I keep a spreadsheet for these things to know when a year has passed and saw that that was the day to renew. So I did. Then in my email I saw that it had already renewed itself earlier in the day, so I had paid twice.

I found a "help" link and sent a short description of what had happened and included the transaction info from both. And today I got a very helpful answer. It seems that at one time AdBlock and AdBlock Plus were different companies (one was started in the FireFox browser but expanded out to others). I picked them up when they were developed but didn't change anything after the merger and such.

We don't recommend using multiple ad blockers (even our own). It can slow down your browser, create issues when you pause, display duplicate payment pages during updates, and doesn't provide any additional ad blocking.

To start with, they sent this article about the two programs I had running at the same time, and had actually renewed one of each. I decided to stick with AdBlock Plus Premium because in addition to Chrome, Firefox, and Edge (plus Edge Beta) I sometimes use the Opera browser that is included; everything else looked pretty equal as far as my needs.

I had an accumulation of extensions I haven't looked at in ages, and ended up removing three other ad blocking extensions in Chrome and a couple of others in Firefox. (One was Ghostery, that used to be kind of interesting in what it reported sites were doing.) I still have Malwarebytes in there, but everything else is cleaned out. And they're going to refund the second subscription (they said tell them which I was keeping and they'd refund the other. Very helpful support folks.)

I also hadn't really set up the Premium features I'd paid for - so I went into each browser and authenticated. This seems to be my computer cleanup season.