I used to use AdMuncher Pro ages ago, been about 6 months without it. I cannot remember the reason why I stopped it to be honest, loved the application to bits. Recently, well, in the past day or so I have been testing out Maxthon Portable. It really didn't occur to me to re-install AdMuncher Pro. I think the lack of IE 11 support did it for me (can't be bothered rolling back to v10). All in all, I am trying to put off re-installing Firefox, or even a Firefox 64bit spinoff.
So, what to try out? I gave AdGuard Free a go. Pretty damn good so far, realllllllllllly loving the sliding scale helper when you decide to manually block an ad on a page. The other bonus of AG is that it covers a crapload of browsers, both original/traditional and unique/spinoff (easy 20+ browsers as first glance). By the way, the only difference between AG free and AG paid is priority support (useful when manual rules cannot be easily created due to complex web coding (I used this feature sometimes when I had AdMuncher Pro installed)) and parental control.
I think, the difference between an installed application that guards/blocks/removes ads and an actual browser addon/extension that isn't installed directly to PC but rather to browser profile is the fact that the installed application will check everything, even the downloads... while the addon/extension version just does the website checking and compares what it sees against the blocker list. Correct me if this is incorrect, but I just remembered one of the two reasons that convinced me to stop using AdMuncher Pro... it couldn't distinguish between file downloaded from a site and web page download/display.
I'd download a file, lets say 500mb, and AdMuncher Pro would still take it into consideration. I would sit there watching some network monitoring software, and AdMuncher would increase just as much and just as fast as the downloaded file was downloading. Ugh! There is no use biyatching about this anyway, AdMuncher devs have stopped improving AdMuncher Pro v4 (rules are still updated) and the v5 version is scheduled to be released some time in the next 25 years (joke, but it is taking its sweet time... I think MS did something in IE 11 that really kicked up a friggin' fuss). Here is where AdGuard is different. It doesn't automate the above, or set it to default or make it permanent. In Settings -> Network, it provides the user with an option to automatically filter browser traffic OR to use AdGuard as a HTTP proxy.
All in all, I will go back to AdMuncher Pro when v5 comes out (lazy to roll back to IE 10), and will continue to use AdGuard Free for now. I will just try my best to keep downloads running through Internet Download Manager where possible, or just load 'em up in IE.