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Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

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Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#31

Post by cremno »

ssalazar wrote: post #25
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

I switched back to ABP when uBlock started universally blocking Sourceforge. I understand Sourceforge has engaged in a number of very shady practices lately, but I need Numpy for my job and I don't have time to work around nanny software.

Uninstalling uBlock, installing and setting ABP up takes less time than temporarily or even permanently disabling the blocking of SF by simply clicking on a button?

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#32

Post by dnlrn »

ssalazar wrote: post #25
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

I switched back to ABP when uBlock started universally blocking Sourceforge. I understand Sourceforge has engaged in a number of very shady practices lately, but I need Numpy for my job and I don't have time to work around nanny software.

uBlock didn't start to universally block sourceforge, they just added sourceforge to their "uBlock filters - badware risks" list, which is justified imo. If you don't want this behaviour, just disable the list.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#33

Post by dnlrn »

ethana wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

What people doesn't know is that uBlock makes use of EasyList as one of its default block lists. EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company. That list itself has built-in whitelist that could not be turn off without revamping the list itself. That list contains upward of 60k of rules and no one has time to evaluate that for free. uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day,…

Yes, you are right, but just to make this point clear: The whitelisting that occurs in EasyList doesn't allow ads to pass through and is in no way related to the "acceptable ads" feature in ABP. The whitelisting in EasyList is because some sites check for Adblock and blocked elements, so EasyList needs ways around that.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#34

Post by contravariant »

ethana wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

What people doesn't know is that uBlock makes use of EasyList as one of its default block lists. EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company. That list itself has built-in whitelist that could not be turn off without revamping the list itself. That list contains upward of 60k of rules and no one has time to evaluate that for free. uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day,…

I'm not too sure if the "acceptable adds" whitelist is built in, they still allow you to turn "acceptable adds" off.

Haven't investigated it thoroughly, but if I recall correctly the adds on reddit.com are block by uBlock, but not by AdBlock Plus (unless you disable the "acceptable adds").

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#35

Post by kazinator »

Steltek wrote: post #26
kazinator wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's quite weird. Not just the back button but refresh, bookmark (star icon), Save Page As ... As I type this comment, I'm noticing that you get almost this same reduced context menu when you right click on the edit box (with additional items like Paste and Check Spelling). Maybe the intent is that you don't unintentionally reload the page or back out when you're selecting. But then Backspace will navigate bac…

It's been that way in Firefox for as long as I can remember (user since Firefox started). I believe the actual intent is that the right click menu is a "context" menu and not a shortcut menu. In this, case, the context is that you have text highlighted. Without a selection, the context is the page.

(Yet somehow, the NoScript add-on's command ends up on all these menus, haha!)

Here is a point also: if you make a selection in one tab, and switch to another tab, the selection in the original tab persists. Yet in the other tab, the context menu is that of the page. This underscores the page versus selection semantics.

Yet, it would probably be more effective if the context menu were the same, just with certain things greyed out based on state.

For instance in, oh, Notepad on Windows (let's drag out that user interface superstars, why don't we) if you have text selected then the context menu enables Cut. If you don't have text selected, then Cut is still there, but greyed out. Hey look, it is that way in this very Firefox edit box that I'm typing in.

The fact that we don't see "Cut" in the page context menu is just as bad as that we don't see the backbutton when there is a selection. Seeing a disabled Cut lets us know that we can select something and then Cut will be available.

On that topic, here is another thing: the page context menu has Select All. That makes it clear that the context menu has a relationship to selections.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#37

Post by WatchDog »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

I tried out ublock, didn’t seem to work on twitch.tv and a couple of other random things. So I moved back to ABP.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#38

Post by karlshea »

elinchrome wrote: post #6
bitwarrior wrote: post #3

Not really a bug, more of an enhancement.

Cem Kaner said that all the pedantry about whether or not something is a bug is irrelevant. He says a bug is anything a user perceives as wrong. I used to worry about calling things not-really-bugs, but when I adopted his viewpoint it gave me a better perspective on what's important in software.

Just like Mozilla's pedantry about what's a "memory leak" that let me to ditch Firefox for Chrome years ago.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#39

Post by joosters »

btgeekboy wrote: post #15
disillusioned wrote: post #4

ABP memory usage in Chrome made me switch to router-level ad blocking. Added bonus: it works on mobile too. I have weird page renderings sometimes, and whitelisting a legit site is a pain, but it's overall a huge value to off-load the blocking to the router.

Do you have any documentation on this? It's something I've been interested in setting up.

I do a similar thing using Privoxy : http://www.privoxy.org/

You'll need to set up Privoxy on a machine on your network (unfortunately the config is not the easiest to get to grips with) and then set up your devices to use it as a HTTP/HTTPS proxy.

If you have a VPN, you can configure clients to automatically use your proxy. For instance, on OpenVPN, add a couple of lines to the server.conf, using your own ip + ports:

  push "dhcp-option PROXY_HTTP 10.8.0.1 4862"
  push "dhcp-option PROXY_HTTPS 10.8.0.1 4862"

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#40

Post by nnethercote »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

[Here's a comment that I made on this topic on my blog back when this was discussed in July, which is still relevant. The numbers have probably changed a bit, but I doubt enough to affect my point. (The link is https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/07/01/firefox-41-w...).]

I’ve seen variations on this comment many times in discussions of this post. It’s totally wrong-headed.

Here are the usage stats for these add-ons:

- AdBlock Plus: 20.3 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...)

- uBlock: 0.22 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock/statis...)

- uBlock Origin: 0.08 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...)

There are ~70x as many AdBlock Plus users as there are uBlock users. Unless you personally convince all 20 million AdBlock Plus users to convert to uBlock, they won’t see any benefit. (And good luck explaining to them the uBlock vs. uBlock Origin split! What a mess that is.) Meanwhile, when Firefox 41 comes out in September, all 20 million of those AdBlock Plus users will immediately benefit, without having to lift a finger, thanks to Cameron’s patch.

Sometimes it’s worth thinking outside the tech elite bubble (the one where “everybody knows uBlock is better”) and thinking about ordinary users in the real world (where most people haven’t even heard of uBlock).

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