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Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

palant.de

51–60 of 124 posts

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#51
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that's because "adblock" basically defined the space. They are entitled to the name recognition, since they built it themselves. It's a bit like WinZip vs 7-Zip.

Good hypothesis, but I suspect it is because of the search algorithm matching words

Yes, but "adblock" wasn't a word before AdBlock appeared, that's my point.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't have a shady track record Care to expand on that?

The eventual setup of their acceptable ads policy ended up being seen as pay-to-whitelist by users and advertisers. It felt that way to advertisers especially when the fee was 30% of ad revenue rather than say, a processing fee for time spent verifying it met the criteria. A lot of them were more ok to ignore ad blocking before they were held to ransom. Users were unhappy at an adblocker's default config allowing ads…

I can see why people would be upset, but it doesn't seem especially shady to me - they were upfront about what they are doing and why. I do remember that multiple forks appeared immediately, but I don't see how trusting someone else in addition to the ABP developers is an improvement... until UBO there was nothing to switch to, and UBO had other advantages.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#54
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, Opera was proprietary with its own rendering engine (Presto) and you could buy a license or you could run it for free with an ad showing (back then, ads were more profitable as well). Bummer they never open sourced Presto. Maybe that inspired Brave. Though you can't "buy" Brave.

There is also Vivaldi, funded by the same guy that formed co-founded Opera back in the day. https://vivaldi.com/ Sadly it is not much more than a reskinned Chrome, same with current Opera and Brave. BTW, Opera offered "tabs" before it was a thing by making use of MDI. And it carried forward until they scrapped Presto. Similarly Vivaldi right now offers to split the viewport into multiple areas to show tabs side by si…

MDI was awesome, and split view was innovative. Especially once you mastered the shortcuts. You can compare it to splitting windows in Screen or Tmux.

Nowadays, we're in a different world though. Multiple monitors is pretty much default for web development on PCs (not laptops/ultrabooks/tablets/smartphones though). Although newer Android versions also contain splitview.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't have a shady track record Care to expand on that?

The eventual setup of their acceptable ads policy ended up being seen as pay-to-whitelist by users and advertisers. It felt that way to advertisers especially when the fee was 30% of ad revenue rather than say, a processing fee for time spent verifying it met the criteria. A lot of them were more ok to ignore ad blocking before they were held to ransom. Users were unhappy at an adblocker's default config allowing ads…

And it can be turned off. It's not a big deal at all. People are making mountains out of molehills.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#56
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eventual setup of their acceptable ads policy ended up being seen as pay-to-whitelist by users and advertisers. It felt that way to advertisers especially when the fee was 30% of ad revenue rather than say, a processing fee for time spent verifying it met the criteria. A lot of them were more ok to ignore ad blocking before they were held to ransom. Users were unhappy at an adblocker's default config allowing ads…

And it can be turned off. It's not a big deal at all. People are making mountains out of molehills.

Ah, so opt-out is suddenly totally OK.

A feature being able to be turned off is a plus, but default features not in the interest of the user are a minus. Especially not when users don't have an easy way to opt-out.

If users reasonably want to only opt-in such a feature, you as developer should implement it as such.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#57
post #5

Adblock Plus sold out a long time ago by taking money from big players to let their ads through. I've been using uBlock Origin for a while and haven't looked back. Plus it's way faster and less buggy.

They never sold out, stop spreading this misinformation.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#58
post #47
post #5

Adblock Plus sold out a long time ago by taking money from big players to let their ads through. I've been using uBlock Origin for a while and haven't looked back. Plus it's way faster and less buggy.

Add in uMatrix for the ideal experience IMO.

Just not on Windows with Firefox. There's still a major rendering bug that makes uMatrix mostly unusable. You can't get to the XHR or frame columns, meaning things like reCAPTCHA aren't usable unless you simply turn off uMatrix for that site.

The current workaround is to open the log and allow/disallow from there. But you can't get to the log button 99% of the time because of the rendering bug.

Not sure if it only affects the Dev Edition of Firefox or not. It certainly doesn't affect the Linux versions, neither Dev or mainline.

Really wish they would fix it. Here's how it looks on reddit, notice how much of it is unreachable: https://i.imgur.com/UHN7AQD.png

I'd love to help, I just don't have the time right now.

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#59
post #58
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add in uMatrix for the ideal experience IMO.

Just not on Windows with Firefox. There's still a major rendering bug that makes uMatrix mostly unusable. You can't get to the XHR or frame columns, meaning things like reCAPTCHA aren't usable unless you simply turn off uMatrix for that site. The current workaround is to open the log and allow/disallow from there. But you can't get to the log button 99% of the time because of the rendering bug. Not sure if it only af…

If you can un-zoom (de-zoom?) the umatrix grid with ctrl/mousewheel does that fix it?

Re: Taking a break from Adblock Plus development

#60
post #58
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add in uMatrix for the ideal experience IMO.

Just not on Windows with Firefox. There's still a major rendering bug that makes uMatrix mostly unusable. You can't get to the XHR or frame columns, meaning things like reCAPTCHA aren't usable unless you simply turn off uMatrix for that site. The current workaround is to open the log and allow/disallow from there. But you can't get to the log button 99% of the time because of the rendering bug. Not sure if it only af…

> Just not on Windows with Firefox.

I am pretty sure uMatrix works fine on Firefox/Windows: it's all HTML/CSS/JS code, and thus OS agnostic -- uMatrix does not care about OS.

Firefox is supposed to resize the popup panel according to the size of its content -- the resizing is Firefox's responsibility, it's out of reach of uMatrix.

I believe there are issues in Firefox with regards to using multiple monitors with different DPI. In any case, you should report your issue to buzgilla.mozilla.org.

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