81–90 of 462 posts
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uBlock can already do this (I use it for hiding the Twitter "while you were away" nonsense), although I suspect that the next step is Facebook scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern.
"while you were away" nonsense? A feature that shows you popular tweets from only people you follow. How is that nonsense?
I already have a whole set of CSS rules I apply to Facebook now, just to make their UI less awful, remove the massive amounts of crud I never want to see, and resize the few things that I do want to see up from their stock postage-stamp sizes. Blocking .ad-unit or #pagesYouDontCareAbout is easy.
Good luck. I suspect in no time uBlock Origin will have found a way to remove the ad elements from the DOM, even if they are served directly with the html of facebook and not a 3rd party domain.
uBlock can already do this (I use it for hiding the Twitter "while you were away" nonsense), although I suspect that the next step is Facebook scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern.
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I can think of a few simple tricks already. One: Host from the main facebook.com domain, either inserting it in the basic html page response from the server, or from an API / content location that cannot be predicted. (ad calls should be indistinguishable from 'normal' content calls). Two, do the same with content locations, so no 'div id="ad"' or anything like that. Should be easy enough.
"Host from the main facebook.com domain..." If true I believe that this would actually be an important improvement. This removes some plausible deniability regarding malware and other abuse; Facebook (or whomever else adopts this scheme) must guard more carefully against abuse when the content is coming from their own domains, as opposed to some third party.
I expect them still manage to hide behind "common carrier" arguments.
I do not think that ad blockers can win this cat and mouse game. Ads don't annoy a large-enough percentage of humans. And the ad industry is the lifeblood of several other business communities, each of which is many times the size of the ad blocking industry. I had lunch with one well respected publishing CEO last week, who told me that his single largest advertiser was Smuckers. The peanut butter maker. Smuckers is…
Why not just allow users to pay to not see ads? It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.
I already have a whole set of CSS rules I apply to Facebook now, just to make their UI less awful, remove the massive amounts of crud I never want to see, and resize the few things that I do want to see up from their stock postage-stamp sizes. Blocking .ad-unit or #pagesYouDontCareAbout is easy.
Honestly, I don't really mind so long as the ads are being served by FB and not third-party networks, and their performance isn't abysmal. The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're tryi…
They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. As long as they don't try to force some sort of legislation on how people can use their internet connection, and their internet browser to fetch and display content, there's no problem. The real problem is Facebook is already full of advertising disguised as content. From sponsored posts to content from things you "like". So I'm kind of surprised…
Serious question: Why do you block FB ads? I wouldn't say that FB ads are any more disguised as content as, say, newspaper ads. And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?
Because I dont like looking at ads.
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Serious question: Why do you block FB ads? I wouldn't say that FB ads are any more disguised as content as, say, newspaper ads. And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?
Facebook already owns my personal data and any content that I publish. Why should I also have to look at ads?