The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive.

My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be.

I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.

I good compromise is uMatrix, which by default only allows first-party JavaScript and cookies and makes it easy to quickly enable JavaScript/XDR/cookies when necessary using a point and click matrix:

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

Is uMatrix something you use instead of uBlock, or in addition to? Also is there a guide on how to use it somewhere

From the wiki page, there are many useful FAQ/ guides/ docs. Specifically, there is a link to a decent guide:

http://adamantine.me/index.php/2015/11/18/umatrix-desperatel...

edit: using both is redundant